First problems

Today we had our second Retrospective and the end of the second Iteration. Also today is the day we encountered our first problems. I feared everything was going so smooth, so I'm relieved to find that everything's quite normal.

The first problem is we underestimated two of the stories we committed to, and thus didn't complete as much as we wanted to. The raw velocity for this Iteration was 9 Gummi Bears, considering the half done stories about 13, but I know we have to stick to those 9 as only those stories were fully closed.

We also discovered that the task decomposition of one of the stories was overly bad, there was no way to implement it according to the tasks, the tasks should be aligned rather orthogonally to how we decomposed the story on Monday.

The second problem was (and still is) of a different nature. Yesterday one of the developers agreed to work with another one on a certain story. Today he found that his way of implementing this and similar stories is very different from the way proposed by the person who took responsibility for the story. I told them to have a positive discussion on that subject, so they did for almost an hour, then we brought the subject to the team's forum, so we collectively decided that the original idea was better. So that person said "OK, I'm sure this will not work (although he wasn't able to convince us). Do it the way you want to do it, but please, for the sake of the deadline we have in a few weeks, please keep me out of the implementation details of this story. After this deadline I'll be more than happy to learn that and maintain that part of the system (although I know it'll be a disaster), but for the time please take that responsibility and leave me out of it."

At first that scared me. Then again I said something like: "well OK, maybe it's a good thing, we'll pair you with other people so that everyone's comfortable, and we'll see after this deadline how things work out."

I really didn't know what to do. I knew that he was a very valuable asset in that area, and he could have helped a lot because no one understands this business as well as him. But then again I don't want him to feel brutally forced and pinned down to doing something that makes him sick. Out of two evils I figured that the latter is worse, as it could cause a lot of collateral damage if this person really feels that way towards this idea.

I dunno if I made the right choice, we'll have to wait, observe and learn from that. Maybe one reason for that in the first place was his absence on the Planning Game on Monday, but I'm not sure his presence would've prevented it.

We had a longer retrospective than originally planned but we needed to say things, I hope they were true. We agreed that we don't take those arguments and quarrels personally, and we don't stop to like each other, we just happen to have different opinions on many technical problems. Personally I think that diversity is a plus for the team, as long as it doesn't tear the team apart, which apparently didn't happen (yet).

Anyway, my wife and I are going to visit our parents for the weekend, so I hope to rest a bit for the next Planning Game on Monday starting another adventurous Iteration. So stay tuned...