We've been having internal discussions about how we can improve the "cohesiveness" our Story planning inside of our XP-/agile-like Iterations. A practice that's worked in my past job role of an XP Coach/Dev has been to hold a "kick-off" when beginning work on a Story.
The kick-off would be where Devs, QAs and Customers converged on what was actually going to get done -- a review of requirements, story-tests, and effort estimates. The kick-off would mostly happen at the beginning of an iteration, but occasionally mid-way through. It was an adaptation to the Customer having obligations outside of the group and not being 100% available for iteration planning. It was also a way to not "waste time" at the beginning of the iteration for stories that would slip from that iteration anyhow -- being a bit more pragmatic rather than predictive.
It made people happy; the Customer got what they wanted and QAs and Devs were in-sync on what needed to happen. It made the story budget more predictable versus not doing a kick-off. It reduced misunderstanding and brought the team closer together.
It did, however, promote laziness in Planning games before iterations. The "deferring" aspect of the kick-off made the Monday at the start of an iteration less hectic, but made it harder to plan a fully productive iteration (i.e. swapping in/out stories based on renewed estimates)
How can this apply to Socialtext? We aren't co-located; we're distributed. It's difficult for us to "get in the same place" -- even if that's a virtual place -- as a result of this. The transactional cost of communicating is also lot higher than in a face-to-face environment (i.e. you have to type instead of using hand gestures and whiteboards). We also tend to prefer working asynchronously -- a hard-stop to do a kick-off meeting is a pain.
Could this approach help Socialtext? I don't have an immediate answer... and it's probably best to have an answer from the "swarm". So, I've started a discussion internally and we'll see if we can adapt this practice to suit our needs.
I tag GabeW next for blogging.
