Day Zero: In the lockers... preparing for the battle

We sat down and I told the team what hurts me most, and what I think might just help. My main concern was not to overthrow them with my ideas, and tell them what's wrong or wright, but just to show them a way out, so that they will make the decision of changing the current flow of work. It was the only way I had a chance to succeed. So I told them about capturing requirements in simple, manageable User Stories, the whole lifecycle of a Story. I spoke about the art and power of decomposition and how it affects requirements specification, feature size estimation, and the process of software design. How a Story gets further decomposed to technical tasks by the whole team during the Iteration level Planning Game. Then I told them about organizing work in swift and wieldy one-week Iterations, that start with the mentioned Planning Game, and end with a Retrospective. At the end I mentioned other projects where this approach saved the day, from other people's and my personal experience. So after a few hours of talking and question answering the team agreed to give it a try.