Wherein we introduce our characters, and set the scene

Now that you have an overview of how thinking in terms of user actions can aid and abet your entire product development process, let's dive in and see how it works in detail.

We'll do this by following a product team as it attempts to build and ship an application. Ultimately I intend to post actual working code for interesting points in this process, but given that Seattle is currently in its too-short-for-my-tastes lots-of-sun season, most of my free time will be spent Trikkeing and so copious amounts of code most likely will not be forthcoming.

Let me introduce our cast, who work play work at Mayhem Maven Studios. MMS creates software for children, chil'uns, Offspring Who Cannot Be Tamed. Their latest program is a drawing program named Rug Rat Rubbings. The team consists of

• Hazim, the program manager


• Lucas, a developer


• Bianca, a developer


• Daphne, a tester


• Jason, a tester


• Oliver, the designer

We join them in their initial meeting to discuss this new product.

Oh, but first: there is user participation in this story! Given the little bit you know about Rug Rat Rubbings so far, what do you think our team's customers will want to be doing? What do you think the user actions are? Post your answers as comments, or email them to me.

"You may be wondering why I called you all together today." Hazim likes to think he is quite droll, but in reality he has only a few jokes that he repeats over and over and over. The team has heard all of them. Multiple times. Too many times. Even though he's only been on the team for a few days.

"Nope!" they reply in unison.

"Hey Hazim, I heard about this 'Humor for People Who Have None' class over at Sopwith Community College; I think they would take you pro bono!" That's Bianca, the snarky one.

Pennies descend on Hazim from the general direction of Lucas and Jason. "Hey look! Now you can afford a new writer!" Daphne interjects. Actually, they're *all* pretty snarky.

"Well. Um. So you may have heard we're launching a new product: a drawing program for kids. The marketing whizzes have named it Rug Rat Rubbings." Except for Hazim - he's just recently joined the company, and his previous job was doing line of business applications for a major corporation. He vaguely remembers having a sense of humor back in his college days, but his time in Corporate America buried it under piles of rules and regulations and grim-faced meetings where people had absolutely no fun. Moving to Mayhem Maven Studios has been rather a large change for him, and he's still in a bit of a daze.

"I know that you all need a detailed specification before Bianca and Lucas can start designing their architecture, and that Daphne and Jason need the spec in order to start planning test cases, and that Oliver needs to know what it is he's designing. I'll be working on that today and tomorrow."

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink