This is part of a series on my apprenticeship at Obtiva. The full series can be found here.

Earlier this week I sat down with Todd Webb to discuss my pet project (more on that soon). He put me through a process Obtiva calls “Solutions Discovery”. This is the third time I have been present in this process, the first two with clients. I really like this process, I have a feeling past projects would have been significantly easier following something like this.

During a Solutions Discovery, Obtiva gets together with a client, over the course of anywhere from half a day to a couple of days, and helps the client define what their business goals are, who their users are, stories for possible iterations, etc.

Simple Tools
The process uses very simple tools that anyone can pick up and start using. A marker board is used to draw and explain ideas that words may have a hard time with. Index cards are used to define business goals, user stories, etc. The best part of the index card? It’s an index card! If it needs to be reprioritized, move it. If it doesn’t make sense anymore, rip it up.

Business Goals
Index cards are used to define what the client considers business goals. These are then prioritized according to what the client considers important. I think these can do a really good job of preventing feature creep. When planning an iteration, it helps guide the client to only including the features that matter to the business goal that is being tackled. For instance, AJAX effects may be shiny and cool, but will they help you generate revenue?

Personas
Personas are used to describe anyone who the client expects to interact with the product. They list the whys and the hows of the interaction, and are then prioritized. This creates a common language for the client and Obtiva to communicate. Instead of referring to a faceless support analyst, we can say “Sally Support”, and everyone in the meeting knows exactly what type of user we are talking about. These also help during iteration planning. If it comes down to picking one feature over the other, the client can simply pick the one that satisfies the persona that is prioritized higher.

User Stories
Index cards are used to define user stories for the different personas. Together, Obtiva and the client list out all of the different ways that a persona would want to interact with the product. During the process, the index cards can be reprioritized and moved around depending on what new scenarios are uncovered in the process.

Once everything is layout out, work begins on reaching a minimum viable product, or in other words, what is the minimum that the product has to do before someone will use it. Stories are stripped out, into what will later be another iteration, until that minimum product is reached. It’s really amazing how a giant list of 30 ‘need to haves’ can be dwindled down to just a few.

There are a couple of other things that may happen during a Solutions Discovery, like legacy code reviews. However, this is the meat and potatoes of why I like the process so far.

Here is the, very blurry, result of my Solutions Discovery. Business goals are the pink cards on the right. The top cards are stories that will be included in the first release, and the stories pulled to the bottom will be scheduled in subsequent releases.