RE: Practice: Weekly Cycle

Ron,

The issue I hear clearly from Keith's posting is the overhead of planning.
That doesn't seem to me to relate to fixed- vs. variable-length iterations,
but that's the manager's concern.

At first, planning for a week's work might take a whole day (20%), but with
practice the team should be able to improve. The common experience of teams
that practice short, fixed-length iterations is that pure planning occupies
an hour or half an hour a week (I'm thinking of the XP Labs teams here).
That works out to 2-3%. Keith, is that level of overhead acceptable to him?

The other advantages of fixed-length iterations:
  * Implicit communication. If you have weekly cycles or quarterly
deployments, you don't have to communicate explicitly about dates. If this
is Friday it must be the end of a cycle. Do we have a deployment March 31?
Of course.
  * Rhythm. Human being thrive on a combination of predictability and chaos
(with different ratios for different people). Fixed-length iterations
provide a welcome element of predictability in what can otherwise be an
overwhelming chaotic process.
  * Encouragement to choose scope. It seems to be very difficult to get used
to varying scope to control projects. The urge to say, "Just do it all and
tell me when you're done," must be very strong or we wouldn't hear it so
often. Fixed-length iterations force scope decisions, encouraging people to
slice and dice their desires so as to get the greatest value now.

That said, there is a lot to be said for variable-length iterations. The
ability to always get a "whole" feature, for example, is very attractive.
The advantages have never outweighed the advantages of fixed-length
iterations in my experience, but it's good to keep both options open.

Keith, is there an experiment you could perform so you understood each
others' positions better? I'm thinking of a paper-airplane folding activity
or origami or something like that.

Kent Beck
Three Rivers Institute

-----Original Message-----
From: Ron Jeffries [mailto:ronjeffries-iH4XQsbo15BDlFalPvvQyA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2004 6:14 AM
To: xpbookdiscussiongroup-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [xpe2e] Practice: Weekly Cycle


On Saturday, December 18, 2004, at 7:54:41 AM, Keith Ray wrote:

> I'm talking to a manager interested in agile development, but he
> doesn't think *fixed*-length iterations are the way to go. He
> understood my explanation about yesterday's weather and being able to
> predict progress using burn-down / burn-up charts. He was also
> concerned that iteration planning might take up too much time in short
> iterations.

What are his issues with fixed-length?

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
The practices are not the knowing: they are a path to the knowing.





 
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