Iteration Planning for E 2.1

Today we had our iteration planning session for Elaboration 2 Iteration 1. We have also acquired some new members to the team and project in general. The session went very well, we started using planning poker cards. As many of the members are new to the process it will take a while for a few key concepts to sink in, such as points not equating to man days, trying to understand that the point estimation is an independent process and team members should not concur or reveal their points before everyone does it as a group as this can influence other people's decision. I guess with more practice these things will become second nature.

In the session we managed to estimate points for and discuss the stories and then futher break those stories into tasks assigning effort in terms of time and associating owners. 

Generally the morale of the project has gone up, people are understanding and participating in the process and will start to see the fun side to it the more we do it.

I do need to find a good analogy for the points not equating to man days problem. 

Here are some statistics from the session:

• 9 Members & 121.5 man days
• 34 points
• 47.25 days to burn
• 45% focus factor
• 7 stories to complete

End of 2nd Iteration E1

The whole point of iterative development is that it a continuous cycle of progress, both in terms of work and skill development so as expected this iteration has been a lot better than the last and we have improved based on the outcome of the last meeting and actions taken. Having a RUP methodology with an Agile flavour means that  the teams are working much more closely and collaboratively. Even though this is the case sometimes disparity can still be a problem where everyone is working on their own little patch. I’ve found the best way to remedy this is to keep a continuous dialog open until the knowledge sharing reaches an equilibrium and you are both on the same page. Pair programming/working also helps with this. Sometimes this approach can be a bit intimidating as it might be perceived that you are disturbing said persons or that you don’t have a full grasp of your tasks but the outcome of completing your task competently far outweighs any hesitancy around communication/asking.
For last week's retrospective meeting I have put the comments from the 3 points:
1)  What we did well?
2) What we could do better?
3) What we would like to start doing?
up on the white board.

Although we did not manage to get all the stories that we had anticipated into the done column, this iteration was much better in terms of burn down and everyone managed to account their time as you can see from the chart.

One of the big obstacles that we have had is in terms of abstraction and detail, so the leads came up with an idea of ‘brown papering’  starting off at the higher abstract level and drilling down into the detail. This was started mid last week so is pretty much ongoing.

Daily Update Meeting - remotely

As Wadz is ill I facilitated the GIMS daily progress meeting. This was a good experience as it is crucial to ensure that order is maintained and everyone sticks to the 3 questions and answers as concisely as possible, otherwise chaos will ensue.

Also, due to being close to Christmas a lot of the guys are off, so the rightshore guys who were on site moved the tasks along and calculated burn down and burn up. This is also very good exposure and experience for them as they will have to take these skills back home with them and ensure that we work in this manner when the project moves into the next phase.

So all in all it was pretty good. It would be so much better if we had a web cam though.

Retrospective

So we had our retrospective today, which was pretty good (I even got to facilitate). Four actions were determined and although we didn't meet our target the general consensus was that this way of working was definitely very good. People felt that they gelled better with the team and had a better understanding of where everyone fits in.

Tomorrow is our last virtual progress meeting then the new iteration begins in the new year. Bring on the new year :D

Virtual Progress Meeting Over GIMS

So since a lot of us work from our home/base location on the Friday and every day we have a 15 minute progress meeting to highlight what we have been doing and any issues we decided to use GIMS (Group Instant Messaging Service, essentially a work MSN).

So this includes a 9 people conversation, obviously this can pose issues and can get very 'messy' so we had a chair who posed 3 questions:

1) What work did you do yesterday?
2) What are you working on today?
3) Any blockers.

Each person was asked in turn, type the answer, move onto the next person.

We had intended to broadcast the board via webcam (the locals in the office would have done this) but unfortunately  our work's network has blocked the webcam functionality which is a shame.

The meeting worked pretty well albeit a techy glitch at the beginning and if we can use VOIP and webcams it will be even better. I think using this approach today and hence forth on Friday's will be a good way of demonstrating that we can do this over a distributed environment (especially if we are to send work offshore).

The only disadvantages are if there are technical problems, the fact that we cannot at the moment use webcams and the meeting takes longer than 15 minutes as people are typing. Other than that it has worked pretty well as a pilot.

Since the webcam option is blocked, I have requested that the local guys take a pic of the board and the burn down chart and send it across to us so we can see the progress based on today's meeting.

It's been a lot better than I had anticipated.

Daily Progress Meeting

So we have just had our daily progress meeting and (as it's the first week) we seem to be burning up. It turns out that we hadn't identified all the tasks on Monday so they have accumulated over the course of the week. This isn't necessarily a bad thing and it is the first week using an Agile approach on a RUP project for plumbing tasks.

 

Although we burnt up and at this stage that isn't necessarily a bad thing, we are much more focussed and the people new to the process are both getting into and enjoying it.

Tomorrow (as us non-locals are travelling home tonight) we will be attempting a progress meeting via GIMS. This will be a good test to see whether this approach is sustainable over a distributed project environment.