Customer

This page describes the role of "customer". Every project needs a customer to tell them what's needed and make sure what's being built is correct. For Growstuff, our customers are a community of gardeners, and there's no one person who can really speak for everyone. For this reason, we try to get our community at large to all contribute to the role of "customer" for our project.

Rough consensus
At present most of our "customer" decisions are made by rough consensus on our Mailing list. If you're a gardener/potential customer and you want to take part in our decision-making process, you should join the mailing list and follow the discussions there, especially those marked "[general]" (the ones marked "[tech]" are usually highly technical and not necessarily of interest unless you're into the coding side of things.)

Feel free to offer suggestions and ideas at any time. You can also respond to any discussion thread. Feel free to disagree with us or tell us if we're wrong about something, or are missing an important consideration. We need your feedback to make sure the site will be as good as it can be!

Signing off on our work
One of the things we try to do is have a customer representative -- a gardener who wants to use the Growstuff website when it's ready -- join our development effort for each 3-week Iteration as we work on code, and review our work and make sure it does what it's meant to.

If you'd like to wear the customer hat and sign off on stories for an iteration, just raise your hand when we ask for volunteers.

How to review our work

 * 1) First, sign up for Pivotal Tracker.  Go to http://tracker.growstuff.org and click "Join Project".  Fill in the signup form (put your name again as the "account name"... it's a weird PT thing and doesn't really mean anything.)
 * 2) Look at the left hand column, which is the "Current" iteration.  You should see some stories which have red/green buttons saying "Accept" and "Reject".  These are the stories you'll be looking at.
 * 3) For each story, open up the details by clicking on the arrow to the left of the name.  Read the details of the story.
 * 4) Go to http://dev.growstuff.org/ and check that the feature is working as described.
 * 5) If it's working, click "Accept" in Pivotal Tracker.
 * 6) If not, click "Reject" and leave a comment on the story saying why you rejected it, or talk to the iteration Coach or the developers about it. They'll have another shot at it and you'll get to test it again.
 * 7) All the stories should, if possible, be reviewed by the end of the iteration.  There are usually 3 days between the end of coding ("pencils down!") and the end of the iteration, but ideally you'll start a little earlier (as soon as stories are completed) so that if there are any problems there is time for the developers to fix them.

That's it!