Iteration XV and IterationXVI - The One Week Iterations
Oh no, here he goes again with one of those Agile posts, he must be on a religious fervor again, yah, I'm gonna need you to come in on Sunday, Peter... how dare you use something that works so predictably for you.. yah
Anyhow, I mentioned our continuing fustrations with our Agile Estimating (lack of) skills. To deal with the feeling of creating a Sense of Urgency and "force us" to get a whole lot better at Estmation, we went to one week Iterations starting last week as an experiment. Remember, I said back here, "We first solved the problem on our team of taking 2-3 days to estimate our stories initially in and got it down into a few hours for our Iteration Meeting.. At that time, we had to get over our want to give perfect estimates and give course estimates to move the process along. But we found that in the last iteration, we didn't come close to finishing our stories for that iteration and in this one, we are 2 weeks + 1 day into a 3 week iteration without finishing a single story out of the 8-10 we have. "
The great news is that not only has our estimating skills gotten a lot better, but both of the last two one-week Iterations have come in completly with all stories estimated done, and additional work added and completed. We're also doing this with some developer training being given to us all on Continous Design, as well as built-in Slack. Slack is an important thing to put in a schedule and please click on the previous link to see what Jim Shore wrote as its hard for me to write something that would add to the fine post. Also see his fine post on Hustle. I should note, responding to some thoughtful replies, that these one week Iterations are again an experiment to "inject a sense of urgency" and "force oursleves" to get a lot better, quicker and accurate at our estimates. 3 weeks is too long for us, 1 is too short, and 2 is probably our "sweet spot" but this experiment is working so far for our goals.
I think the one week Iterations have a lot to do with it, but we also moved to a Task Based Estmation with every story being broken into tasks and each task estimated in the meeting. This helps with some initial team based design as well since we're all particpating in breaking down the Stories now to estimate them.
Since the whole point of this experiment in one week Iterations, other than the constant one of delighting the customer with as much business value functionality as possible on time, is to improve our estimating skills and more predictably come in on time on the estimates, we have implemented estimating and tracking those broken down tasks on the back of the card. We used to, in our three week Iterations just try to estimate the big User Story without any task breakdown. One thing junior developers rightfully pushed for was for the more senior and experienced people help break down the stories with them on a whiteboard to lead the design. They were often left with the big story and their pair without a sense of the big picture and the overall design. Now, we are collectively breaking down the story into tasks at the Planning Game, doing some design on the way, and then task tracking. I'll continue to let y'all know how it works if I'm not too busy worshiping with my religous fevor at the alter ...
Jeffery Palermo, who I'll see along with Scott and others on the 10th in Austin, adds some nice experiences on to my post with their two-week Iteration cycle.