I don’t think you can do agile without knowing of Alistar Cockburn — he’s one of the father’s of the agile movement and his name sits next to Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, and Martin Fowler on the Agile Manifesto! :)

I believe he was talking about Outside-In development (as opposed to Inside-Out development, where you worry about your own needs as a developer — e.g., the database schema, etc., first.) And yes, I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, that’s not always a core tenet of agile methodologies but rather User-Centered Product Development. In fact, I’ve seen agile teams in the real world consider user tested to be an optional story as it is not core tenet of systems such as XP. This is why I advocate a hybrid User-Centered *Agile* Product Development process (a combination of XP and UCPD) that bring the user (as opposed to just the customer) into focus during the development process.

I found your memo to the CEO at FOTB very useful for me personally and it introduced me to methodologies and design patterns I otherwise wouldn’t have known about. Today is see their necessity and purpose and apply them as much as I can.

I just got back from day one of a two day training with Allistar Cockburn and noticed he said little about the end-user; something you stated over and again with regard to Agile programming (or were you proposing that as more of an XP facet than Agile?). You often talked about starting with the user/tester’s story and working backwards to the back end, and doing the opposite of “waterfall”.

Allister spoke little today of the end user experience and focused more on software development without “tasks” “documentation burdens” and many other exercises he shared that were helpful for overall communication and proving how it breaks down and why — but I was surprised how little was mentioned of the user’s story and how that should come first. Why waste 80% of time failing like you said.

So I’m curious if you have any take on Alistar’s viewpoint if you’ve read his Agile work?

Thanks for any feedback.

Michael.