Iteration #1 – Day #2 Tuesday 12/10/2002

Another standup and all is still well on day #2. We still don't have our bullpen yet, but I am assured it will happen by tomorrow. Hardware has been approved and ordered and should be here by the end of the week baring any supplier shortages. The hardware we can work around until we get serious about processing our test data. In fact we are temporarily borrowing some servers from the dev lab and QA until the dedicated stuff arrives.

No real pairing happened today, although several informal collaborations did occur. Things should get better when we get our space. Until then we need to make a point of walking around to keep the communication flowing.

The real event of the day was the decision not to branch the source tree. This has the impact of essentially bringing 2 other projects into the agile sphere of influence. This is slightly earlier than anticipated, and may add some additional risk, but offsets the risk of merging the source at a later date. Overall I view it as a good move as it places our project firmly in the "real project" category away from "pilot project".

The other interesting decision that has come to light is who determines when a task is complete? We had decided that each task is either complete or not complete for the purpose of status tracking and avoiding the 80% complete syndrome. Today the PM asked the obvious question. "who decides?" After a little reflection it was obvious that completion is determined by the acceptance tests owned by the customer. In our case this role is executed by the QA department. The interesting follow up on this is that QA has the power to prevent a feature from being released. They have asked for this power before, but never really given it. We'll see how this is viewed by our customer rep and the execs soon.