Iteration #1 – Day #5 Friday 12/13/2002

Brief status: bullpen space is ready, but desktops not installed - still shooting for EOD Monday.

We "accidentally" made another team agile today. Historically "teams" are single developers working on a specific feature set. Today we took 2 "teams" and ran a modified version of the planning game since these developers were already working together since their features impacted each other. The net result was that the customer re-prioritized their existing tasks and they are working on completely new tasks that better support the business needs.

That was the results. How we got there is another story. Initially everyone assumed that we would be re-prioritizing the existing tasks, but the developers would essentially continue doing what they were doing (i.e. no real change). In fact the original purpose of the meeting was to introduce the developers to agile practices, terminology and start an iteration. However, about halfway through the meeting our customer stated that he was trying to prioritize stories based on what had been accomplished, the technical risk, peoples personal preferences, etc. In other words, not like a customer at all, but a technician. So after a brief conversation about the customer and developer roles we threw all priorities out the window and started over again. This time with great results.