Retrospect: First Agile Iteration

Friday marked the end of the first iteration for the team. We finished respectfully, completing about 84 points of work with 82% story acceptance. These metrics will likely be adjusted Monday morning as we evaluate the status of the last few items to see what might actually be finished in the Monday morning build. The Monday build is the official Iteration 2009.2 build and should be archived for posterity.

Now that we have the first one out of the way, we have a start toward measurement. We can use the points completed in the iteration as a first estimate of how much work the team can finish in a 2 week period. We will get data for about 3 iterations and start averaging the number of points completed to get a baseline team velocity.

There were several learning moments in the first iteration. First, we did not do a great job of defining stories and acceptance criteria. While stories were created for bags of work, and some acceptance criteria was included, we did not create precise expectations around the format or the granularity of stories. Several team members are still struggling with the concept, since there is no such thing as a story template that is universally accepted. Stories are varied and customizable to the particular circumstances.

We also had questions around when the actual finish date for the iteration should be. Since the iteration ends at COB on Friday, many developers talked about needing to be done coding by COB Thursday of the last iteration week. This allows a day to fix any defects found by the test group on the last day of the iteration. Then, the official iteration build is the one created on the following Monday morning.

This week we do it all over again making incremental improvements on what we learned the last two weeks. We will have the team planning meeting tomorrow morning and cover the standard format for story description in Rally. This will include more precise information about what the story should do. We'll do a better job of having acceptance criteria meetings with sub-groups. Here we will refine the description of the story and add test cases as we discuss it. We will also do a better job of hourly estimates and individual capacity so that more of our tracking views will be accurate this time around.