Iteration #1 – Day #3 Wednesday 12/11/2002
Another standup and all is still well on day #3. We still don't have our bullpen and the hardware hasn't been ordered. But in the tradition of "do the simplest thing..." we are moving forward.
Still no real pairing yet, this is mostly because our current offices make it so dificult.
The concept of agile is catching on in the entire office now though. My office mate spent the night reading an OOP book with agile overtones and is starting to understand (Shu Ha Ri).
I am looking in to Ward's FIT testing framework so kindly ported to .NET by Jim Little. It looks like our QA team can use this to help with regression testing etc. that could just overwhelm a QA team working in an iterative process. My big mental leap is going to be trying to use the framework to do acceptance testing rather than unit testing.
We had another breakthrough on how we are going to implement agile processes in our office today. We started with the assumption that the first iteration would be "pure" XP and that we would refine our process at the end of each iteration. However, our XP "customer" is physically our product manager plus our QA department. So the effort of specifying the stories initially is done by the customer, however, those conversations don't always happen with the QA person nearby (this might be alleviated by a bullpen, but not entirely since there are multiple pairs). In the spirit of lightweight communications and "do the simplest thing" we are thinking of installing a Wiki to facilitate the communications as well as satisfy the needs of some people to have things written down somewhere. The added advantage of the Wiki is that the FIT testing framework can leverage it and we can keep our stories/requirements/tests in one place with a minimal amount of bureaucracy.