Day One: And here they go ...

I came to work and realized that I forgot to check if they have cards for the Planning Game. Of course they didn't, why should they :). Fortunately a block away, I found a warehouse that agreed to cut me 200 cards for a reasonable amount in 10 minutes time :). We could've used normal paper, but I personally don't like it, cards 10x15cm made from 240gr/m2 paper are way way better than anything else I've used :).

So starting a bit late we begun identifying various User Stories, giving them short descriptions, and estimating in some number of cute Gummi Bears. At first a Gummi Bear was about one ideal work day, but this rapidly blurred away. To find what the value of a Gummi Bear is, we'll have to wait and measure the Project Velocity.

The first thing that annoyed me was the room, we didn't leave it, everybody was sitting at his computer, so after a while half of the team was distracted doing something else. Unfortunately we had no other choice as there was no room to go to, so I had to ask the team to concentrate, and explained again the importance of what's going on here. Surprisingly it worked and soon everybody was committing to the discussion as much as his knowledge of the project would let him. But in the future I think I'll try to find something more suitable for this purpose.

One might notice the absence of a real customer at this Planning Game, while I'm open for discussion on how to organize that, I had to choose between doing it this way, or don't doing it at all. One of the problems is that we have more than one customer, and they don't directly know each other, and have somewhat different requests and priorities. So after reading an article at agilealliance.org on working with multiple customers I decided to have an internal one, at least for this stocktaking Planning Game.

That said I have to admit that the project leader and part of the team are somewhat experts on how this particular business domain looks like. The project runs for almost a year now, so they have a fairly good understanding of what the client needs. One of them has shown us an existing system that we should largely mimic, and the rest is covered in the mentioned analysis document. So although I know and feel the importance of a customer on a Planning Game I'm not so sure that he was crucial at this moment in this particular context.

What I was counting for though was also to recognize which parts of the system we do not understand at all, and which we *almost* understand. Name them and then bring them to the client for an open discussion.

The day ended having 15+ User Stories written down and estimated, as I suspected a few Stories were named but marked for discussion with the client, as we found we don't really know what he needs. Also we found a few stories that we decided to write down just for remembrance, and for now marked in memoriam as we found that those things are not going to be really needed for this release.

The day was a total success.