Re: Practice: Weekly Cycle

Hi Kent, I just love your summary of  the problems:

Kent Beck wrote:

>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
>
With many of the same people we tried, three weeks, two weeks and one 
week.  Most of the time was spent doing two week iterations.
Three weeks:
    * Iterations were frequently *broken* by customers, and managers
    * Planning took a long time
    * The cycle felt wrong
    * Progress was measured too infrequently
Two weeks:
    * Favorite of the team.
    * Progress was measured every two weeks
    * The cycle: plan, light design, fix problems, start tasks and 
acceptance tests,  start focusing on  story, focus on story completion 
and pass off, focus on optimizing the number of points
    * Each iteration had about three days of relaxed work and three days 
of very high energy work
    * Tracking was done twice: Thursday and Tuesday (iterations started 
on Monday)
    * Sickness and holidays didn't impact velocity much (except 
Christmas :) )
    * It gave one weekend to think about your stories and one weekend to 
forget work
    * It adds a *doing something different* each week
One week iteration:
    * Stories and tasks not completed
    * Tasks became more important than stories
    * Cycle missed the relaxed period
    * Iterations were rarely *broken*
    * Trouble fitting enough stories into iteration

On the middle Thursday we could tell how the iteration was going.  If  
things were in trouble we could increase the energy earlier in the final 
week.  On Wednesday, stories started being passed off.  Late nights 
occasionally happened on Wednesday and Thursday of the final week.

In answer to your question, we knew early if we our stories were going 
to be completed and we reacted accordingly.   I still need to think 
about accountability.  I am now seriously trying one week iterations 
with a new team; I will let you know if accountability is increased.

cheers,

Zhon


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