How we do this - process

I get a lot of questions about how we do this project. I’m going to start with describing the process in this post and am already preparing a follow up about the actual development. Comments and questions about our process are most welcome, but if it’s something about the development you might be better off wait for that post. That being said, here’s how we do it, the process part.

Our cycle (re)starts on Thursdays. Each Thursday before lunch we meet our customer to make sure we're on the right track. Since we have decided on two week iterations, every second Thursday we first have a sprint demo and then (re)prioritize all remaining stories in the backlog. The other Thursday we just discuss issues from the first half of the iteration and status of other ongoing tasks - i.e. stuff that people outside the team are doing. That may be setting up the production servers in the customers’ environment for example.

On the sprint ends we have a retrospective where the whole team, except the customer, get together and discuss the sprint. At first we had it before the customer meeting with the demo, but we always had to rush it in the end to get done before the customer came. Once we invited the customer to join or retrospective, but since the involvement during sprints is so low the customer didn't have much to say. Hence we decided we'd keep doing without and moved the retrospective to after lunch. The time before the customer arrives we now use to prepare for the demo.

The next step in the process is the task breakdown of the top prioritized stories. We get the whole team together and the Interaction Designer, who has somewhat the role of the on-site customer, will walk us through the stories and show the prototype. We take the the stories one-by-one and after the walkthrough we break down the story to tasks. When the breakdown is complete we play Planning Poker to estimate each task in measure of days, with half a day being the lowest estimate. Tasks a lot smaller than that we try to merge together.

When we had the retrospective before lunch we had task breakdown after lunch. I felt we needed some more slack to really end the first sprint before starting a new one though, so that was another reason for changing the meeting calendar. As we moved the retrospective to the after lunch slot, we now break down the stories on Friday after our daily standup meeting. I feel that it gives us a lot better rhythm. That also leaves some air on Thursdays to execute some ideas from the retrospective and deal with some technical debt.

Speaking of the daily standup we have it each morning at 9.15 except for Mondays, when we have a general meeting for the entire company at that time, and have our standup after that. We have all done Scrum before and have learned to value the daily standup meeting a lot. That’s about all we took from Scrum that doesn’t exist in XP though, except maybe the role Board Master that we invented to have some responsibility for our Kanban board.

We have the standup meeting in front of the Kanban board. Our board now has the columns Selected, Development, Test and Done, where the Development column is split into three sub columns - In progress, Trash and Ready for Test. The trash column is the only addition from our original board. It is used for collecting all tasks before they are all done. When all tasks are done we will move the story card to Ready for Test and the trashcan can be emptied.