Iteration #2 - Day #-2 Monday 12/30/2002

Today was our iteration #1 postpartum and iteration #2 planning game. The potpartum revieled much of what I wrote about Friday. The things we need to improve on are: task definition, unit testing, refactoring, integration, and visible status.
  • Task Definition: Our tasks were at too high a level for the PM to feel comfortable, so we agreed to bring the level down a bit.
  • Unit Testing: Except for myself, no unit tests were written. Everyone expresses the desire to write tests, but things get in the way. I.e. needing a user session to test many of the operations. Eventually we'll have a design without these dependancies, but right now we don't, and we'll never get there without some unit tests.
  • Refactoring: See unit tests
  • Integration: It took us until day 8 to get a build to the integration and QA environments. We did better the last few days, but we can't create a build at the push of a button, nor can we deploy at the push of a button. Lots of hand editing of config files in different environments.

Another interesting fact came out of our discussion with our customer. He was feeling nervous about progress since our integration was late and couldn't determine the true state or quality of the project. We determined that our binary approach to story completion didn't reflect what people needed to know. So we changed our approach to list the number of test cases that passed and failed as a stacked graph with time as the X axis. This should give the stakeholders a better feel for how complete the iteration is.

The planning game went smoothly. The participants all know their roles now and we jumped right in. The only discussion we had was around the velocity we should use as a team verses individual velocity. We didn't calculate our iteration #1 velocity because of all the learning and the holidays, instead we kept the same team velocity of 4. One of the developers mentioned that he really was operating at a velocity of 10 (1 ideal day/iteration), but wanted to be at 4 (2.5 ideal days/iteration). We discussed the concept of yesterdays weather and the role of velocity in estimating the amount of work that could be completed and the fact that if he got his tasks completed, there was always more work to do.

All in all a good session. The next iteration should be smoother, we know where we need to concentrate and we know we can be productive using this new process. A big win for everyone.

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