Job Description, part II

I’ve found the perfect job description for my last 12 working months as I read through Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP while on vacation in Florida.

It was taken from the XP2001 workshop report “Customer Involvement in Extreme Programming”:

“… extreme programming (XP) insists on an on-site customer, who has many different tasks:

“Understanding customer wishes, maintaining regular contact with end users, and balancing their potentially conflicting interests.

“Talking to developers, clarifying feature requests when needed, and understanding some of the developer’s technical concerns.

“Specifying funcational tests for user stories, and verifying that these tests run correctly.

“Participating in the planning of iterations and releases.

“Maintaining good contact with management, explaining progress, and justifying the time spent with the development team.

“… Being a customer requires a number of skills that are independent of the application domain. These include balancing potentially conflicting end-user needs, experience in requirements gathering, reporting to upper management, controlling the budget, and checking for forgotten requirements.”

So you can see the large number of ‘hats’ that I wore during the last 12 months and probably for the next month or so, until the project is delivered. Now, I just need to work out how to turn this nightmare-ish experience into my advantage…