RE: Practice: Weekly Cycle

Practice: Weekly Cycle

Actually, this is the best part yet, and very recognisable. Since we
started working agile we somehow found that a one week iteration cycle
is giving us optimum performance.

Anything shorter than one week would be almost unworkable because of the
increase in the percentage of overhead (planning game / stand-up) on the
whole. Anything longer than a week just seemed to lead to student
syndrome.

( Johanna Rothman writes about student syndrome in her log:
http://www.jrothman.com/weblog/archive/2004_11_01_mpdarchive.html#109942
422980640438 )

Longer iterations have another danger. I've seen teams with four week
iterations. Now people tend to be busy. Sometimes the planning game gets
postponed, or even skipped all together. You don't want that, but that's
the sort of thing that just happens. Imagine what that would do to a
four week iteration project. In a one week iteration project skipping a
planning game is still a hazard, but the risk is significantly lower.

Having one week iterations has shortened our project time considerably.
We very seldom have a project of over three month's duration. Our
clients just let us run their project for three to four weeks then take
it home and play with it for a month or two. This allows them to
evaluate the project and gather feedback. After a while they come back
for any missing functionality or optimizations, if any, which we run
into a new project. These follow up projects are often less than half
the size of the first. Say at most a week or two.

This works extremely well for government organizations or banking or
other larger organisations whose internal decision making just takes up
more time. As an added benefit it allows the team to shift their focus
to other projects in the mean time.

As a second benefit this cycle gives clients the ability to discover
their real needs and priorities in contrast to their wants or initial
beliefs really well.

>   3. Break the stories into tasks. Team members sign up for tasks and
> estimate them.

This is probably the part where our practise differs the most from
traditional XP. Because of the short iterations stories are simpler and
much more straight-forward. In the setup I've described above, the team
found splitting up stories into tasks and writing them on cards and then
signing up for them too much overhead. Sometime you do need to think the
tasks over. When a story is slightly more complex, or when someone has a
clear idea of how to implement the story, they write the tasks somewhere
on the story card. Because of the decreased complexity of the stories,
most of the time a pair signs up for a story, seeking assistance from
others where they feel they need it.

The planning game is rarely on a Monday. The planning game is usually on
the day the project starts, which might be any day of the week, but
Wednesdays and Thursdays seem more popular.

>   Planning is a form of necessary waste. It doesn't create much value
all
> by itself. Work on gradually reducing the percentage of time you spend
> planning. Some teams start with a whole day of planning for a week,
but
> gradually refine their planning skills until they spend an hour
planning
> for the week.

I don't necessarily agree to this phrasing. I think planning is a very
valuable activity and that a plan is a form of necessary waste that
doesn't create much value by itself. We've found that planning time
increases exponentially with iteration duration and the number of pairs
simultaneously on a project. Better split the project up and integrate
it later.

> I thin*K* ownership of tasks goes a long way towards
> satisfying the human need for ownership. I've seen other styles work
well,
> though. You can write small stories that eliminate the need for
separate
> tasks. The cost of this approach is more work for the customer.

As you can see ownership is covered by a person or pair signing up for a
story in our team. That works well because the pair also gets to
experience the sense of fulfilment of delivering that value to the
customer themselves.

Somehow the seven day week is a pattern that humans have ultimately
adjusted to at perhaps an unconscious or even genetic (or religious)
level. It balances effort and regeneration. Adjusting your iteration
length along it looks like a very good idea.

Cheers,


Marko van der Puil.

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