Embedded Stream

Our team has been using the agile planning process as described in Extreme Programming since the start of the project, and I’m currently thinking quite a lot about how this has been going, and how it should integrate with slightly more formal methods.

The basic idea is probably familiar to most people. New work is measured in terms of User Stories, which are tangible scenarios for the end user. This sets the main focus to be deliverables that make sense to a consumer, rather than the tasks required to implement them. Cards are scored in terms of relative complexity to each other. There are different approaches to scoring cards, but we’ve been working with the simple model - 1 represents the smallest piece of work possible, 2 is twice as complex etc.

Work is carried out in 2 week iterations. At the start of each iteration, there is a budget available that can be spend on new story cards based on the amount of work completed the previous iteration (velocity). The focus about which cards to work on is based on what is most important to the business / consumer. The main thing is that planning work is purely based on the speed at which the team has been delivering.

All story cards are put up and organised on a large whiteboard. One side has a ‘menu’ for new stories that can be picked, organised by category. The other side has the next 2 or 3 iterations, and the story cards that we are planning to work on.

Each card is intended to be a placeholder / memory jog for all of the discussions and thought that has already exists around the team about the designs issues and details of what is required.

This is the basic method we’ve been working with. I’m out of time, so will discuss some of the issues in another post…

I just listened to a NOFX song that made Monday morning seem like a nice, happy thing, just like it should be.