At long last, Luke Hohmann’s book
‘Innovation Games’ has arrived. I became hooked on Innovation Games when I read an early draft of Luke’s book. That seems so long ago!

A software group is best measured by its customers’ success. Understanding what they really need is critical, but customers are human too which means that they’re fallible. Customers can’t always tell you what they want because sometimes they don’t know themselves, so asking them to rank requirements or write stories might not be the best place to start.

The book is a collection of games you can play with the customer to gain a better understanding of what they need. Although the book is really about product management (working out what product a customer wants), I think these games are useful for agile teams trying to get a better understanding of what their customer wants.

Steve Freeman and I ran a really success session at last year’s XP day on this very subject.

I’m experimenting with the patterns to help me introduce agile developement into organisations.  So far so good.  I recommend it.  They have an interesting  quote from David Baum’s Lightning in a Bottle

If your change process is like most, about 15% of your folks are going to be thrilled and will only want to know what took you so long. About 15% will utterly reject the need for change, and won’t be happy no matter what you do. The remaining 70% will sit on the fence and quietly watch to see who’s winning.

This middle 70% is where you need to put your most time and energy.  That is where the victories really count.  The 15% who are positively excited will need very little support and encouragement .  They are already motivated by the change.  For the negative 15%, there may be nothing you can do.

How true.

For me the best thing about this book is that it shows you how experienced developers produce a well crafted, easy to test, web application. It walks you through using interfaces to separate the database from the code. It provides oooodles of examples of using mock objects to make testing easier. It shows how experts use Test Driven Development (TDD) on a real world (web) application.

Oh, and it uses some nice open source libraries along the way. One of the best ways to learn something new is to pair with an expert. The next best thing is to read a book like this!

Check it out on amazon (uk)

Shame about the title!