Who is Playing the Customer Role in Second Life Agile Teams?

There's been a recurring meme on Twitter over the past few months that Linden Lab employees don't use Second Life very much themselves. Just last week, Delinda Dyrssen revived Paisley Beebe's Mentor a Linden Day concept:

If some of the really hard core users who spend many hours trying to educate, work, create, collaborate and or play in SL were to spend a few hours with some of the key Linden Labs employees.. one on one..doing what they do..showing these talented Linden Lab people the pitfalls.. the needs, the it would be cool or useful if we could, just even how to sit down or put on a pair of shoes (Phillip did say it was difficult to do that). Then..and only then could they really come up with a viewer and platform that serves most people needs in a Fast Fun and Easy way.

I have no idea how many Linden Lab employees use Second Life on a regular basis. Certainly very few of them are openly active members in Second Life communities. In any case, it made me wonder who is playing the customer role in Second Life agile teams.

The key to a successful Agile approach to software development is that the voice of the customer guides the entire process. Agile methodology builds software through a series of short iterations that are typically one to two weeks in length. At the start of each iteration, the person or acceptance team in the customer role sets the development priorities for the week and helps define the acceptance criteria that will be used to test whether the iteration's work is successful.

The Agile process breaks down if there aren't people on the acceptance team who have a deep, working knowledge of the end-user perspective. Although the resulting software will work well from the team's point of view, it may not be useful to the customer. A good analogy is a French cooking team trying to create a new dish for the Thai market. Although the resulting product will be delicious to the European palette, it may leave a bad taste in the mouths of the intended customer.

So I wonder who is playing that role on the Linden Lab Scrum teams. Any Lindens care to weigh in?

The Real Gift of Linden Lab's New Development Approach for Second Life

I take back all I've said about the reasons I love the idea of Agile Development for Second Life. Not because I don't believe that an open and iterative approach is the best way to deliver great software. But because there is another benefit that so far outweighs the others I've mentioned that it is like comparing the light of the sun to the twinkling of distant stars.

Okay, I hear you, "Enough teasing Botgirl! What the hell is this alleged gift about which you have been unsuccessfully trying to wax poetic?" Ready? Here you go. The precious treasure is:

A Perpetual Drama Machine.

That's right. There is nothing that the Second Life Community loves more than drama. Emotional speculation about the possible consequences of Linden Lab machination is right up there with shopping, dancing and SLex as the most popular virtual pastime. And by opening up their virtual kimono and accelerating releases, Linden Lab has allowed us all to have a never-ending supply of drama-fodder that we can play with across the worlds in blogs, social network posts and raging transplatform flame wars. Each iteration, we we can exhaustively examine every emerging feature and find the hidden seeds of paranoid- or bliss-inducing soma, reading the shifting backlog tea leaves to play digital Nostradamus.

Of course, the Second Life community that will benefit the most from this priceless gem is the blogging community. So thank you, Philip from the bottom of my raving pundit heart.

Deciphering Philip's Geek Speak: Intro To Agile Software Development

For better or worse, it looks like Agile Development Methodology and Open Source Software are going to be the future of the Second Life platform. At least for the foreseeable future. As I was nodding my head the other day listening to Philip Rosedale gush about Scrums, backlogs and iterations, it occurred to me that the 98% of Second Lifers who aren't professional software developers probably didn't know what the hell he was talking about. Or worse yet, they've heard doomsday conspiracy-theorists raving about cults and radical ideas on the virtual street corner.

It seems to me that creating a basic primer on Agile and Open Source for Second Lifers would be a very worthy project. I planned to start over the weekend, but unfortunately spent so much time mentoring Majic on her video project that I didn't have time to start.

So for now, here's a comic my human counterpart co-authored a couple of years ago that walks through Agile Development for a non-technical audience. Although it is mostly about corporate software development, the basic principles still apply

Open publication - Free publishing - More waterfall