With the First Day of School quickly approaching, it’s time for:

What I Did For My Summer Vacation – Part 1

Exploring Requirements

I get really excited about hanging out with people, especially friends, especially a combination of new and old friends. So it was with great happiness that I set about organizing a geek gal weekend.

Our first conversations centered around budget (fixed), deadline (fixed), and features (flex). We started talking over the various activities that different destinations could provide to entertain us. Then, I paused the conversation to bring the focus back to value: when we looked back on this weekend, how did we want to remember it? how would we feel about the way we spent that time together? would features even feature in these stories we would tell? Instead of features, we realized that functions (what the product was going to accomplish) and attributes (characteristics desired by the clients) mattered more. (Why yes I was reading Weinberg this morning. How could you tell?)

Vintage gold lamé (see that gaw-jus totally 80s animal-print metallic finish? oh yeah.)

We wanted to relish the simplicity of being together, whether wearing goofy vintage clothes (gold lamé for the win!), cooking our own meals together, telling silly stories, or engaging in feminine activities with a geek spin (magnetic nail polish was not as simple as expected) that would be low-key and more about togetherness than busyness. We wanted to craft something lasting (collaborative artwork – packing the craft supplies was a must not a want!) and reinforce durable friendships that appreciated our differences.

With this clear focus in mind, suddenly the locale was much less important than inclusivity to maximize togetherness.

Planned For Sand

So we made an informal backlog of tasks to tackle researching options (beach vs mountains), reviewing results, and prioritizing options (beach!) before presenting our findings to the group for dot voting. (Typical agilists, I’m tellin’ ya.) Fortunately, we found a viable approach and went forward with making arrangements to execute this solution (road trip!), adjusting as we went to accommodate discovered needs.

How did it all turn out? Stay tuned for scintillating tales of laughter and danger in What I Did On My Summer Vacation – Part 2!