Saturday, June 24, 2006

Day Five: first retrospective

Today we ended our first iteration. We were all surprised to find out that our speed was better than we expected, because we had to pull an additional 3 Gummi Bear User Story to have enough things to do. As we talked during the retrospective the team was very happy with the development process, especially with the User Story cards, decomposition to tasks and developers signing up for them. That really suites them.

What they found difficult was some of the Story dependencies, they asked for a way to mark them. I asked them to track dependencies without special demarcation for now, just as common sense, and when it becomes a problem then we'll address it, but for now I convinced them to try without it. I believe more constraints and attributes will slow things down rather than help us. We'll see.

I didn't close the Iteration formally yet (in XPlanner), as one of the guys said that he will commit an hour or two tomorrow to close one of the almost done Stories. I know I shouldn't let him do that, but he was very eager to do that and I cracked.

Monday we start the second Iteration, but we'll have to have out Planning Game without one of the development leader, as he has been asked somewhere else and he can't be there on Monday. I decided that we can't hold back and will do the Game ourselves choosing Stories that we feel comfortable with. I think that's better that putting the whole team on hold for a day and messing up the whole Iteration because of that.

Tuesday I promised my boos to update him on the project status, I'll analyze the project speed, and summarize the Stories to have a feeling of what's ahead of us. This will be the day of terror I feel. Though I hope not. Please don't shoot the messenger.

Sorry for the poor text today but I had a few beers with my brother-in-law and it's 3AM and tomorrow early morning (9AM) I have to drive something like 250km ... ;)

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