Iteration 33 and Going to CTP

I mentioned back months ago how well things were going back in Iteration 20. Since that time, we have been consistently hitting our weekly Iteration targets with exception of the previously noted one here. We did learn a lot from that Iteration and move on by not repeating the mistakes. Specifically, the problems revolved around in-adequate task breakdown and bad estimates. It is very important not to get a sense that the Planning Meeting *must* get done by some time and perhaps jepordize proper task breakdown. We hurried through our planning and thus screwed our iteration.

During our Monday morning Iteration meeting, we have a demo of working software that we did the week before. It is vitally important in Extreme Programming to have working, integrated and tested software at all times and be essentially "shippable" at any Iteration boundary or at least Release boundary. You will see how that played into shipping our CTP. We also have a Retrospective where we get real honest about what went well and what didn't and what we can improve from the previous Iteration. Then we enter the Planning Game. Business presents stories. We come up with enough that we think will match our present Velocity and then the whole team does Design. We break down all the stories into Tasks. During that, it's vitally important to allow enough time to discuss what database tables need to be added/modified, what objects in the Domain Model get effected, overall approaches; i.e. design. At the same time, we cannot let it descend into the lowest details and out of control. So it's a balancing act.

As mentioned before, Jim and I introduced one-week Iterations way back here as an way to raise the Sense of Urgency and get everyone's head in the game and get everyone to own the product. Frankly, the team was underperforming at the time but since that time, we have become an awesome machine with Friday after Friday delivering on our objectives. The team has gotten so *great* that they now love the One Week Iterations and refuse to leave them!

So onto the CTP. We came to the point after 33 Iterations that we had enough functionality to deploy our first "CTP" out to an International bank in Paris. Just think of it - going into CTP with Indigo at a bank!! How awesome is that? Anyhow, even though we "ship" every Friday internally to our "Customers", Product and Business, it's quite another matter to actually ship outside! So, we made a list of all things we needed to do to become "Shippable." Things like Strong Names, Versioning, Oracle parity with SQL Server, Install scripts, Click-Once in the real world, etc. Then we talked with Product/Business and said that we *must* have do these things before we ship. And we scheduled a whole Iteration of these things. This is where I got to inject some knowledge from the places where I have shipped. But the team got mobilized behind the goal of shipping. Shipping has to be a mindset as well as something to do. You need to know when to let go as much as how to keep "getting it right."

We went into CTP this week. Like all CTPs, it's been a bit rocky with all the issues that one doesn't expect but happen anyhow-). I may talk about some of them in generalities in a later post but the important thing is we turned that corner and it instills yet another sense of confidence in all of this. Me? I'm proud of each and everyone of us.

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