Last iteration (or is it?)

Again I apologize for not posting any new entries. The day of moving to our new home gets closer and closer (hopefully this weekend) and so every afternoon til late in the night I work hard to make it prettier ;).

At the project site we have just completed iteration 7, one story slipped to iteration 8, which started Monday. The project velocity dropped from 13/14 Gummi Bears to about 12 Gummi Bears, that is because more and more time we work trying to integrate our front-end system with the back-office system which is developed by an other team.

Nevertheless we just started our hopefully last iteration, though we packed it with 13 Gummi Bears we hope to finalize it. So that's really good, Friday is the date that I foretold 7 weeks ago :D based on one iteration's progress. Cool. Much luck I guess, ehh, hell with that, we're simple grrrreat! :D

The sad part is that this is not the end, the system is a part of a whole, and now we have to integrate it with an other part of the system, we developed the front-end and there is a back-end being finished as we speak that has to work with our front-end. We know the team, we like each other and are in contact, but the development method was different and we didn't plan things together. We started integrating a few weeks ago, little by little, that's why the velocity dropped a bit. Things are not that bad, minor changes and tweaks were til now sufficient so we hope (yeah, that's all we've got-hope) things will work out in a matter of a week or so.

I'm not too happy with that integration going on as a side topic, I know that according to XP, we should integrate every Friday. But that's as far as I was able to go given the time I had, the progress the project had, and the pressure there was. If I had the time and opportunity I would gladly bring those techniques to the other team, schedule even iterations, and have integrations in every iteration.

There is more work to be done, the feature list is not exhausted yet, these were just the primary-value features. So I hope I will get a chance to push the development process a bit further down this road.

As for now, next Monday I plan to have a planning game that will discover all the integration tasks that have to be done, so we can schedule then and track as we did with normal feature tasks. After all it's one of the customer wishes that the system is integrated as a whole, so I imagine a User Story: "The system parts are integrated and it doesn't fall apart when used." :D LOL.

Oh and our Mrs accepted her first tasks for the former and present iteration! Overestimated them by 100%. Sweet :). Brave young woman. :) She's doing a really good job.

One thing I think we have to do better is the retrospective. It's Friday afternoon, everybody wants to go home, and it's really hard to concentrate on reflecting. Coincidentally today I read a chapter from Testing Extreme Programming by Lisa Crispin et al. It was about retrospectives, how to handle them. She gave ideas and examples of how to use this idea brought by Martin Fowler in 2001.
I think I'll try to use the iteration grade card she provided. It's just a list of iteration activities and the team assigns grades to them, so we all know what we need to improve.
The original Martin's three questions list (what to start, stop, continue doing) also looks appealing, I'll think things through and hope to use something this Friday.

So stay tuned for more "of the battlefield" reports.