I recently attended the BCS Software Practice Advancement 2006 conference where I spoke on Early Aspects. However, the most enjoyable session I participated in as a non-presenter was called Getting to Know Your Customer and was run by Andy Pols and Steve Freeman.

The session covered Innovation Games (developed at Enthiosys) and a technique for understanding systems complexity called Cynefin.

We played the Product Box innovation game where, as groups, we took a blank cardboard box and decorated it with the features of a fictional mobile phone that we thought would appeal to a particular market segment. In addition to being a good icebreaker this activity got us all thinking about which features would attract / repel our target customer, which features we were keen on but our customer might not be and the relative importance of features.

I’ve been thinking for a while now about how to incorporate game-play into Software Product Line education, training and development activities and Andy and Steve’s session has given me the impetus to focus on this more. I’m running a tutorial at the 10th Software Product Lines Conference in August and I hope to adapt some of these ideas so that they can be included there. In particular I aim to develop the Buy a Feature game to highlight some of the issues that come up when performing Product Line Scoping i.e. deciding which products (and features) will make up your product line.