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Chapter 2: Agile Methodologies and Approaches

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Remember in the following discussion that there is a fundamental difference between the product you

are building (the eCommerce site) and the products in the actual store (shoes, clothes, etc.). As long as

you keep the two concepts straight, you ’ ll do fine.

Looking over your notes and mockups, you develop an initial product backlog based on successful

stories. A good story usually follows the pattern “ As an X, I want to do Y, so I can do Z. ” Here are a

few stories you can put in the product backlog — and please note that normally the product owner

would do this, but at this point it ’ s faster for you to set a precedent:

1. As a user, I want to view a featured product on the home page so I can buy it.


2. As a user, I want to view other related products on the home page so I can buy them.


3. As a user, I want to view a list of categories so I can navigate to those parts of the site.


4. As a user, I want to be able to navigate to Product Detail pages so I can buy products.


5. As a user, I want to see related products on a Product Detail page so I can complete outfits or
   buy accessories.


6. As a user, I want to be able to see product thumbnails and images as often as possible to get an
   idea of what the products look like.

This is enough for now. Tomorrow, you ’ ll meet with Claudia and she ’ ll take over the product backlog.

The Second Day

When you see Claudia the next day, she looks concerned. You ask her what ’ s wrong, and she starts right in.

“ Well, I ’ ve been thinking a lot about the web site, and I think we ’ re missing some key points. First of all,

I want users of the site to be able to search for products. I also think that they need some way to check

out. I ’ m also concerned that we haven ’ t thought through the process of adding items to a Shopping Cart. ”

“ That ’ s fine. Let ’ s walk through them all quickly and update our mockups. Then we ’ ll update the

product backlog I started last night and let you take it over from there, OK? ”

With that, you ’ re off and running, asking about search. Would it be better to have a link to a search page, or

a search widget on each page? Claudia definitely thinks that a search widget on each page would be better.

What does the search operate on? In other words, what fields in the database does it search through?

Claudia thinks for a moment and settles on category names and product names. You add that it wouldn ’ t

be that hard to also search through descriptions. While Claudia considers this, you update the home

page mockup so that it looks like Figure 2 - 7. You show Claudia the new mockup and tell her that

every page would have the search widget on the top.