Code, the Universe and Everything.

Next week is Agile 2008. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to go. But a couple of people I know are going. So, in order not to miss too much of the fun, I will be monitoring the Agile 2008 FriendFeed room.

I have to admit, I’m becoming a FriendFeed addict. I find myself using the service a lot and I’m curious to see how it will evolve. What I find most interesting on FriendFeed is the concept of rooms they have there. At work, we started using a private room of our own, where we post ideas, share little snippets, etc… Some of my team members were already using delicious, where we agreed on a common tag that is only used by our team, and that works. But having the ability to comment, like, etc on the things you share, gives IMHO a much richer experience. Using FriendFeeds imaginary friends, we actually “source in” the stuff we tag on delicious into our private room for work. The only gotcha there is to not use the delicious sharing feature of FriendFeed, but rather the “blog” feature of FriendFeed, and set it up so that it reads the rss feed from your specific tag.

So, to come back to the original topic of this post, I am very excited to see whether enough people will join and participate on the the Agile 2008 FriendFeed room room, and that it will give me, someone who is not participating in agile 2008, enough information so that I at least get a serious idea of what I am missing.

**edit** If you happen to know existing agile 2008 related forums, mailing lists, groups, etc, please let me know about them, or better, spread the word about this FriendFeed group.

Nick and I are working on a web application (of which we will blog later). Yesterday evening we organized the first user acceptance test session.
Instead of getting together in one location, we set up a distributed user acceptance test session, using web technology and tools. All participants were at home. We used Skype to set up a communication channel. Skype supports conference calls upto 5 people and that was enough for yesterday’s session. We used Google Docs to share a document where the participants could record issues, suggestions and new features. A Google spreadsheet allows multiple users to edit the spreadsheet simultaneously. It shows which cells are being edited, so that it is clear where another contributor should not change the document. And of course, the participants also opened the web application in a web browser.
When all participants were online with Skype and they had the spreadsheet and the web application open in their browsers, the session started. The conference call enabled us to have discussions about features and issues. The shared spreadsheet enabled us to quickly write down issues and suggestions. All the participants saw the changes to the spreadsheet and could immediately review what was written down. Often this gave rise to new discussions to clarify what was written down and it often resulted in short brainstorms about new features.
The session was fun. We had lively discussions and we laughed with ideas that built on other ideas about extra functionality. The feedback flowed easily into the spreadsheet. We had interesting discussions about end-user and technical aspects of the application. One participant’s girlfriend joined the conversation and gave very good feedback from an end-user standpoint.
From this session I learned that the right tools are available to set up distributed work sessions. I really enjoyed it and I hope to do it again soon. I like to thank the participants for their contribution. We owe them a beer.