RE: Practice: Weekly Cycle

The problems to be solved are:
  * Having a sense of progress
  * Having an accurate measure of progress
  * Delivering efficiently
  * Tracking changing needs
  * Building a trust-based relationship inside and outside the team
  * Enabling the team to offer accountability

One of my principles is working with human nature, including natural time
cycles. One week and one month are common cycles. That's why I'm suspicious
of two-week iterations--fortnights aren't nearly as widely used as either
weeks or months.

I have a question for those using two week iterations. After the first week,
how do you know if you are half done? Is this even an interesting question?

Kent Beck
Three Rivers Institute

-----Original Message-----
From: mfeathers-mn4gwa5WIIQysxA8WJXlww@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:mfeathers-mn4gwa5WIIQysxA8WJXlww@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2004 8:23 PM
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Subject: Re: [xpe2e] Practice: Weekly Cycle




-----Original Message-----
From: William Wake <william.wake-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

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)

I'm curious about the question behind all of this.  What problem are we
trying to solve?  I know Scrum teams that have four week sprints and they
work fine for them.  Teams I work with tend to have 2 week iterations.
There are two reasons why I occasionally  try 1 week iterations: 1) to
develop more practice discipline, and help people learn how to work in
smaller increments,  2) to give the customer more control.  But, generally
these are not long term concerns.

I do see the benefit of shorter iterations, but to me it should be tied to a
concrete problem.  Otherwise, aren't we optimizing something that may not
need to be optimized?


Michael Feathers
http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.MichaelFeathers.TheNewGuy









 
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