First demo and retrospective meeting

May 28, 2010 Leave a comment

Today we did the first demo (sprint review meeting) of the functionalities developed so far. Unfortunately this morning when we arrived there was a bug on the demo server (we updated the last code just before leaving the evening before) , we fixed it before the meeting but we choose to do not show at all the user story “search the arranged trips” even if in any case it was not done. During the demo we found a problem on the story “search travellers” so our Product Owner decided to do not validate the story. There was just a little bug that we fixed in one minute in the afternoon but the impact was declared not acceptable to consider the story as done.

The afternoon was dedicated to the sprint retrospective meeting where we identified and analysed the points that should be done better and we put some new actions for the new sprint. The main points are related to:
– Test process
—- do a brainstorming session to identify the test at the start of the sprint
—- the person that write the tests is not the same that execute the tests
—- verify a story at the end by someone in a challenging way
– Done criteria
—- be more precise on the done criteria with more interaction between the team members and the PO

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Last day of the sprint

May 27, 2010 Leave a comment

Today was the last day of the sprint. We finished almost all the stories, only on the “search trips” we still have to do something on the UI. Tomorrow there will be the first demo where we will present the functionalities developed so far.

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Sprint 1 – end of second week

May 21, 2010 Leave a comment

Here we are, the second week is terminated (the first one where all the team is present). For the moment we officially achieved only 2 points on the 13 of the sprint but two other user stories have been completed today and we wait only the approval of Claire.

Next week we’ll have to complete the story to search the travellers (almost finished) and to do some work on the story to search the arranged trips. The demo is planned for Thursday… it will be a busy week so I think it’s better to recharge our batteries during this long weekend 😉 (Monday is vacation: ” lundi de pentecote”).  See you soon!

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First day of “real” work

May 18, 2010 Leave a comment

Planning is done, and back from vacation. Time to get to the real stuff: implementing these user stories.

We were given a short demo of what has been done during last week for us to catch up. We could already see the new tab, with some sections in it (they were previously in another tab and moved there), which actually work. Rather impressive!

Céline and I started to work on the UI part of a story, and it went rather well. Now we need to start everything related to documentation, otherwise I fear we will have everything to do at the end.
And the same goes for the automated testing. We will need to learn how to do that as soon as possible.

My first real daily meeting is approaching, and we’ll see how it goes 🙂

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The scrum board

May 14, 2010 Leave a comment

scrum boardHere a photo of the scrum board taken during the first week of the sprint. We organized it as a pure scrum board (vs Kanban board) but we’ll wait all the team to be present to decide eventually a different organization.

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Finally we have it: the big whiteboard!

May 10, 2010 Leave a comment

This morning the SCRUM team finally got his new big whiteboard! 🙂 Soon some photos of the scrum board. There are some vacations during this week (Sebastien and Celine) but today we started the first iteration. Personally I started studying the code of some user stories then I decided to work on the user story that tells to have the new tab visible in the application, so pure UI … if we have to learn UI this is a good starting point! The new tab is already visible in the application but there is still work to do.

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Our roadmap

May 7, 2010 Leave a comment

taw first roadmapHere we are… our road map is done. We have increased our guessed velocity and we have changed the order of some user stories. From the photo you can see the famous post-it used in Scrum mode. The photo  is taken with Sebastien device, not a powerful one ;).

Thanks to Celine to have changed our ugly header blog with her beautiful drawing.

First week is passed. On monday the first sprint will start even if not all the team members will be there. That’s all for the moment… “bon weekend”!

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Roadmap is done

May 7, 2010 Leave a comment

Well, at least of first version of it. We barely managed to put all the stories to make the new feature at the same functionality as the old one, so no wonder Claire looks disappointed 🙂

However, the team feels confident that we are capable to do more than that. Guess we’ll have to see after the first sprint for how it goes. The main worry is all the testing activities, but I am more optimistic (unrealistic?) about this.

Velocity estimation was done in two steps. First we took one story (a 1-point one) and split it into tasks, estimated each of these tasks, to arrive at a stunning total of 8 days (which would mean a velocity of 5). When looking at the story globally, everyone agreed that 4 days should be a max. So we reverted back to a “best guess” at velocity (10-13), which still looks a bit pessimistic to the team. Wait and see 🙂

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Planning the release

May 6, 2010 Leave a comment

Today we created a rough product development roadmap. Normally there are two questions used to initiate the release planning:
– When do we want the release?
– What is the priority of each story?
For the first question not much choice, the date is fixed by the next release of the product at the beginning of September. Generally this bring to have a release planning with fewer variables to consider but with more difficult decisions about wich stories to include…  this seemed really the case. To decide the priority of the each story we used as a first step the MoSCoW rules (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have this time). Claire assigned the rules, then the priority to each user story considering the desirability of the story.

From story points to expected duration
With each story estimated in story points what we needed was to convert these points into predicted duration for the project: the answer is to use velocity, the amount of work that the team can done in an iteration. To get the initial team velocity we took a guess (no historical value for the team, wait to run an initial iteration?). Our estimated velocity was at the end 12 so not possible to complete all the user stories for the fixed date, but this doesn’t mean will be our real velocity, after every iteration another more precise estimate will be done, changing the release plan.

Creating the Release Plan
The final step was to allocate stories into each iterations (6) following the priorities given. The result has been to have many user stories left outside of the plan, among them many user stories that marketing consider also as “must to have” for the customer… Claire didn’t seem very happy looking at the release plan. In any case tomorrow, planning the sprint iteration, we’ll take a look another time to our velocity and if we’ll see some important difference we’ll change it.

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Estimations complete

May 6, 2010 Leave a comment

We at last completed our first round of estimations! Not that bad if you ask me, even though I am sure we will soon discover that some of these are way wrong 🙂

My first impressions are that we spent too much time discussing (or rather guessing) how it should behave functionally, instead of just putting it away waiting to discuss it with Claire.

And I have at last got to turning off my screen when in a meeting 🙂

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