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Summary of December 11 meeting:
(See also the meeting writeup on the AMPG Wiki).
We started the evening by reviewing the user stories and rules of the card game Hearts we have gathered at our November 6 meeting.
At our last meeting we had just started discussing the scenario of the first trick, so we continued our meeting by finishing the description of this. We then moved on to the subsequent tricks, noting that they were all rather similar except that after sloughing or breaking of hearts, hearts and the queen of spades can also be used to lead a trick. Sloughing and breaking of hearts has the same meaning –a player playing a hearts or queen of spades because he cannot follow the suit of a trick.
We also discussed the scoring of the game. Scores are computed after every round, that is after all tricks have been played and no cards are in any player’s possession. Additional rounds are played until the game is considered to be over – after any player has reached a certain score, a certain number of rounds have been played, or the players mutually agree to stop the game.
Now that all of us had at least a rudimentary understanding of the game of Hearts and had a common metaphor, we reviewed what we had documented and started isolating user stories. At this point our discussions took a rather interesting turn.
We began by trying to understand more fully how the customer envisioned starting the game and what would appear on his computer monitor. We talked about how each player would interact with the cards – dealing them, playing them on the table, passing cards, etc. We briefly discussed the value of having the computer fill in for missing players. We also talked about the possibility that the computer could monitor player’s selection of cards, making sure that none of the rules of Hearts were breached. Our customer decided that he didn’t want the computer to intervene, rather that the computer system should only facilitate playing Hearts with friends over the Internet.
After assessing the value of some of the application’s features, it suddenly dawned on our customer that the greatest value of the project was just facilitating the handling and displaying of cards over the Internet so that he and his friends could play cards remotely. This realization caught all of us by surprise as we all approached this project expecting that we would develop an application to play Hearts. Now it appears that our customer really wanted something that even he himself did not anticipate – a program to remotely handle and display cards.
With this newly discovered project goal, we began to generate new user stories – the program would need to be configured to shuffle cards and deal the correct number of cards to all the players. Methods to handle the cards would need to be developed. Recovery from network glitches would need to be considered. Since our time ran out, more stories will be gathered at our next meeting.
All in all, the meeting was very enlightening. In addition to the interesting issues that were raised throughout the evening’s discussions, we learned an important lesson. The extra amount of time that XP encourages conversing directly with the customer allowed the customer and us to more thoroughly understand the customer’s requirements and begin developing a much more optimal solution.