Day 2 - More Planning
Day 2 of this shortened timebox was the second of our Technical Planning days. As I mentioned in my previous post, we have two half days of Technical Architecture/Planning at the beginning of the time box. We continued to review details on the user stories for this box and also tightened our estimates a little bit for remaining stories. We look at whether we need to write code from scratch, we can make use of community code, or enhance community code from the Drupal project.
We colour code our stories - white for not scheduled, yellow for scheduled and committed to, greeen for QA ready, salmon when we need more information, and grey for stories that we defer for future timeboxes. We re-reviewed stories from yesterday for which we needed clarifications. These visual queues make it really easy to scan the Google spreadsheet(s) and see the status of a given story.
Our story spreadsheet header describes the information we're looking to capture for hand off to the development team.
We capture a story ID - and will do point increments when we have sub-stories related to a given feature. Each story must be associated with a ticket and includes the description of the story, questions from various team members, and points to illustrate the level of effort. One point is a half day in our world.
After The Technical Planning
The three project managers then finished breaking up the projects between them. We try to all take part in the planning days so we're in the loop on all the projects. Projects are typically broken up into development groups with an attempt to have as distinct a team as possible with little overlap. This is sometimes difficult as all code is reviewed by another developer and another themer before it even has a chance of making it out for QA.
We also ended up having our retrospective from the previous timebox today. Typically that would be scheduled for day 20 in the timebox, but constraints delayed this meeting. We tweaked our process in a few places. For example, much of our discussion is done in IRC - we decided that for our releases we would add voice to the mix for the end of this timebox. We use logged IRC to keep our decisions and conversations logged, but sometimes you need a more rapid way of getting another person's attention.
We're Starting the Next Timebox?
Finally, Day 3 of the timebox is the point when priorities for the next timebox are shared by the Executive Committee. Today was a day where a representative from the product team, from the project management team, and from the release team met to put final "t-shirt" LOEs on the prioritized feature backlog. The list of desired priorities will be delivered tomorrow and user stories, wireframes, and comps for the next timebox will begin to be generated. In a very real way Day 2 represents the first day of the next timebox.
What's Next?
Tomorrow will be the first day of our code sprint which will last for 7 work days. The team will also start on user stories based on the priorities set by the executive committee.
