Re: Practice: Weekly Cycle

All - 
When you have two-week iterations, I'm curious what that means:

- do you have twice as many stories "in process"?
- is your typical story unable to be completed in a single week?
- or is a story the "usual" :) size, but you have "wait time" within it?
- do you tie releases to the iteration length at all?
- ... (the other 20 reasons I'm not clever enough to make up here)

In Brad's case,
>On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 15:27:56 -0600, Brad Appleton 
><brad-777BKhlmzsrR7s880joybQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> When one's project and team is but one in a whole set of projects and 
> project teams that have to be coordinated together, and when all the other 
> project teams aren't doing "iterative" (mcu less XP) and/or aren't doing 
> releases that are <= 1month, then trying to get one's own team and project 
> to do weekly iterations was getting too difficult because there was 
> too much friction in coordinating with the other projects/teams that simply
> couldn't deal with us moving that fast. We needed the extra week not 
> only for additional planning and interfacing but also to give them (and 
> the customers) something much more stable to use/evaluate for at least 
> 2-3 days.

Did you feel you couldn't do one-week iterations yourselves, and have
a "drop" ready for the other teams on a slower basis? The "extra week
for planning and interfacing" just sounds funny at some level, like no
more work was done but the pace was better. (Note that I don't mean
2-week iterations were wrong for your situation, I'm just trying to
understand what couples your "internal" cycle to their pace.)


I've used a variety of iteration lengths. I've noticed that teams
almost always want to push for longer rather than shorter, but rarely
for reasons I've particularly liked. (Like some of you, I have on
occasion gone with the team's consensus.) Of course, I have the same
challenge about how much testing to do and lots of other stuff as
well.

One effect I worry about is the "software in process" idea - iteration
length to some degree controls your responsiveness. At some level, a
2-week iteration suggests you either average 3 weeks turnaround from a
fresh new idea, or you use the Scrum idea of "cancel the iteration",
or you set up some expediting.

-- 
   Bill Wake  William.Wake-HInyCGIudOg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx  www.xp123.com


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