A great team will produce technically excellent software without
28 C H A P T E R 3 : U N D E R S T A N D I N G X P
on-site customers, but to truly succeed, your software must also bring value to its investors. This requires
the perspective of on-site customers.
NOTE
Include exactly one product manager and enough other on-site customers for them to
stay one step ahead of the programmers. As a rule of thumb, start with two on-site
customers (including the product manager) for every three programmers.
[Coffin] describes an experience with two nearly identical teams, one that did not have on-site
customers and one that did. The team with no on-site customers took fifteen months to produce a
product with mediocre value.
The total cost of the project exceeded initial expectations and the application under delivered
on the user??™s functional expectations for the system... real business value was not delivered
until the second and third [releases] and even then the new system was not perceived as
valuable by its users because it required them to change while providing no significant benefit.
A team composed of many of the same developers, at the same company, using the same process, later
produced a product with compelling value in less than three months.
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