Section 17.2. The Stories

17.2. The Stories

As the Customers on the development team, Mitra and Seth, met the next morning to discuss the last of the new stories for the next iteration. The current iteration ended that day.

17.2.1. Previous Rentals Repeated

"The first story is crucial," Seth told us. "We have several requests for supporting repeated rentals from two of our major clients," said Seth. "What makes it especially urgent is that XYZ^[2] allows for previous rentals by a customer to be repeated, which saves lots of customer-service time. There is pressure on us to match this in RentEz."

^[2] XYZ is a competitor rental application.

"That seems straightforward," replied Mitra. "Have you seen the XYZ rerent feature?"

"No, I haven't; it's probably better to come up with our own approach and not be influenced by what they do."

"Especially as we're sure to do miles better," laughed Mitra.

"The idea is that customers can say that they'd like the same rentals as last time," explained Seth. "Presumably, they may want to change the list," said Mitra. "Yes, the particular items and the numbers of them," replied Seth.

Mitra suggested a wording for the story and wrote it on an index card:

RepeatRental. A customer wants the same rental as last time. The customer may change the various items and the numbers required.

"Yes, that's good," said Seth.

"We can flesh it out when we write the Fit tests, once we've sorted out the rest of the stories," Mitra concluded. "And it could be any prior rental."

17.2.2. Rental Calculations

After discussing other stories for an hour or so, Seth raised a topic for a fifth story. "Many people want to rent for a wedding, for example, but are not sure what quantities of things they need. Some rental companies provide rental lists for various numbers of guests. Others have spreadsheets to calculate the numbers of cups, and so on, based on the number of expected guests. But there's still a lot of data entry. It would be handy to have help in RentEz for calculating the numbers required."

"So why not have templates for various events? A template defines the numbers of each item as a proportion of the number of guests expected," replied Mitra. "Does XYZ allow that?"

"Not as far as I know," said Seth. "What do you mean, as a proportion?"

"Well, here's an example. For every 50 people, you may need one coffee dispenser, so the proportion is 0.02."

"Oh, OK. So the template can be used for any number of people?"

"Yes," replied Mitra, "it would be like the spreadsheets that you mentioned but they would be built into RentEz. That would be quick."

Mitra wrote these new stories on two index cards, as follows.

CreateRentalTemplate. A rental template defines a list of rental items. For each item, it specifies the proportion of that item per person.

UseRentalTemplate. Given the number of guests, generate the rentals required.

"Can the numbers of items be changed once the template has generated the rentals?" asked Mitra.

"Yes, probably. Teetotallers wouldn't need some items for a party," Seth grinned. "Let's not forget that we may need only one of an item, regardless of the number of people."

"Yes, usually only one microphone will be needed for a wedding," Seth replied.