Last night I went to a meeting at a agile user group in Trondheim. It was the first meeting and it went really well. One of my co-workers presented hands-on experience with Scrum, taken from the project I'm currently working on. Many of the attendance had experienced the same problems we struggled with. The conclusion of the talk, was that the biggest problem is communication. Communication between stakeholders and developers, but also communication between developers. In future projects I'm going to focus even more on the communication between the project participants.

In one of the other talks, "paper" prototyping, was shown. I really liked the idea. This is how they did it: First they gathered the stakeholders and some of the developers. Then they used a white-board and drew all the screens in the application on it. A digital camera was used to take a photo of every screen they had drawn. They then imported the photos into PowerPoint and linked  the buttons and other interactive GUI elements together. This way they could click thru the application and "try" it out before the coding and graphical design started. Doing prototyping like this, makes it easy to change the screens and all the project participants easily sees how the application should work. This eliminates a lot of unnecessary discussions between team members. I will definitely try this out in the next project.

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