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Lecture 13, Wed 02/02

Wed Lecture: Product Management

In team02, you are working with a Kanban board populated with issues (cards).

This is very real world.

But: in the real world, where do the issues (cards) come from?

That’s todays’ topic.

High level outline of today’s class meeting

• In plenary session (12:30-1:00pm)
  • 5 minutes: Conrad: overview of today’s lecture
  • 10 minutes: Kevin Heffernan: presentation on Product management
  • 5 minutes: Conrad: overview of product management activity
• In teams: ~1:00-1:30
  • 5 minutes: standup
  • 20-30 minutes Product Management activity
• In teams: ~1:30-1:45
  • Work on team02

Product Owner / Product Manager

We’ll start today with a presentation by TA Kevin Heffernan about the Product Manager/Product Owner role in a software development team.

The short version is that a product owner is the “voice of the customer” on the team.

They:

• Talk to customers, prospective customers, and end users about their needs
  • These are not necessarily the same.
  • The customer is the one that writes the check, that makes the buy/no-buy decision.
  • The end user is the person that actually uses the software.
• Work with the software development team to turn customer needs into “user stories”
• The user stories are then turned into issues (aka cards on a Kanban board.)

Kevin will tell you more: Slides

Let’s do some product ownerish stuff

What we are doing: spending some time thinking about how to design a web application

Why we are doing this:

• Learning/Educational reasons:
  • Product design is an important skill
  • Good sw dev organizations involve developers in product design
• Practical reasons
  • We are doing a fresh start implementation of proj-ucsb-courses-search
  • Reason: we’ve found a much cleaner/simpler architecture; easier to learn, easier to add new features

First Exercise: Thinking like an end user

We’ll be looking at a piece of software produced by past UCSB CMPSC 156 students (specifically, from F20, W21, S21).

This piece of software is intended as an “improved version” of

• https://my.sa.ucsb.edu/public/curriculum/coursesearch.aspx
• Features available to you on GOLD

A few things that the app offers:

• Basic course search (but for a wider range of quarters; it goes all the way back to 2009)
• Advanced course searches. Some examples:
  • When was a course offered over time, and who taught it?
  • For a given professor, what did they teach over time?

There was an intention to start offering the ability to put together “sample schedules” of courses (this feature requires login), though it was never fully implemented. Think about: if it were, what would you want it to look like?

What	Link
Running Appllication	https://proj-ucsb-courses-search.herokuapp.com
Source Code	https://github.com/ucsb-cs156-s21/proj-ucsb-courses-search
Backend API (Swagger)	https://proj-ucsb-courses-search.herokuapp.com/swagger-ui/index.html
Storybook of React Components	https://ucsb-cs156-s21.github.io/proj-ucsb-courses-search-docs/storybook

Step 1: As a group, organize the document into sections by user

• Please open the Google Document 2/2/22 that was shared with you in your Slack channel.
• If you didn’t already, add your name to the top.

• Now, add six headers for each of your names, so that you each have a section of the document to enter some notes, e.g.

  Alice

  Alice’s notes here

  Bob

  Bob’s notes here

  Chris

  Chris’ notes here

  etc.

Step 2: As an individual explore the application for 5-10 minutes

Then, as individuals, spend 5-10 minutes doing this:

Next: Open up the application.

• Spend a few minutes exploring the https://proj-ucsb-courses-search.herokuapp.com application and it’s features.
• Compare/contrast with https://my.sa.ucsb.edu/public/curriculum/coursesearch.aspx and GOLD
• Think about what would be valuable to you as a student.

Step 3: As an individual make some notes (5-10 minutes)

Then, make some notes about what you see that is good, and what could be improved.

As you make notes, consider including screenshots.

• What features do you find the most valuable?
• What changes would you make to the user interface?
• What features are missing that you think would be valuable?

If you’d like to see a certain feature, consider mocking up a design of what the forms would look like.

If you’d like to see changes to a User Interface, consider making a screen shot, and then marking it up with the changes you’d like to see.

Step 4: As a group, discuss your lists (5-10 minutes)

Add a section at the top of the document with a header called “Group Discussion”

Group Discussion

Enter notes here

Alice

Alice’s notes here

Bob

Bob’s notes here etc.

Invite each student on the team to share their thoughts about the application.

One member of the group should make some notes about what there is consensus about, and where there is disagreement. This final list should be a distillation of what the most important features that you’d like to prioritize in the new version of the application.

What happens next?

In a future exercise, we’ll practice refining the high level notes into

• User Stories As a __ I can __ so that __
• Issues on a Kanban board with Acceptance Criteria

But before you start that:

• Do a standup meeting, no more than 5 minutes, on team02
• Standups shoudl be quick! That’s why they are “stand up” meetings (to make them short)
• Just quick updates, and identification of blockers.

Avoid getting into technical details.

• When you have a blocker:
  • Don’t say: “I’m having this problem with OAuth (10 minutes explanation of the problem)
  • Do say: I’m having a problem with OAuth (10 second explanation of the problem.)
• When you have a solution to a blocker:
  • Don’t say: “I know how to fix that! (10 minute explanation of the fix).
  • Do say: “I know how to fix that! Ping me later on Slack and I’ll explan what to do.”