It's 9:35 AM; do you know where your agile team is? If they are using William Pietri's example schedule, they are in the middle of their stand-up meeting, unless it's Monday, in which case they are doing iteration planning & kickoff. William's sample schedule is understandable and practical, and sparked discussion that explored subtitles in scheduling for agile teams.
Here's the example schedule:
| When | What | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Monday, 9-10a | Iteration planning & kickoff | All team members |
| Tuesday-Friday, 9:30-9:40a | Stand-up meeting | All team members |
| Tuesday, 2-4p | Product stakeholder meeting | Product managers, external stakeholders |
| Wednesday, 10a-12p | Product planning | Product managers |
| Wednesday 4-5:30p | Estimation | All team members |
| Friday, 4-4:30p | Product demo | All team members, external stakeholders |
| Friday 4:30p-5:30p | Process retrospective | All team members |
Steve Bockman and William went on to discuss the value in holding an estimating session about midway through the current iteration. The estimation that will take place is for future iterations, not the current one. One of the advantages to this approach is that most estimation work is done before the iteration planning meeting, helping to move that one along. Additionally, it gives the product managers time to incorporate the estimates into their planning and prioritization work, before meeting with the team to plan the upcoming iteration.
George Dinwiddie suggested sliding the schedule such that the iteration starts sometime other than Monday morning. William shared that he is currently working with a team that ends the iteration on Wednesday at 10:00 AM, and kicks off the new iteration after lunch.
What does your iteration schedule look like? Are there additional meetings? Fewer? Where do the boundaries between iterations fall? Leave a comment and share.
Community comments
Start of day
by Michael Krumlauf /
Adjust as necessary
by William Pietri /
Re: Adjust as necessary
by Jochen Witte /
Get a Real Job
by Andrew Hamilton /
Re: Get a Real Job
by William Pietri /
too short
by Andrej Ruckij /
Start of day
by Michael Krumlauf /
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By looking at the example schedule I am assuming we are talking about the day starting at 9:00am. Most of my team begins their day by 8:00am or before, so by 5:30pm many are on their way home.
Adjust as necessary
by William Pietri /
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Yep! As I mentioned in the original article, this is just a sample. If you use it without adjusting it to local conditions, you have already failed. :-)
Get a Real Job
by Andrew Hamilton /
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Another example of the pathetic busywork that managers (project and otherwise) occupy themselves with. Agile and its related schemes represent needless complication of the simple and common sense - through the usual misdirection of jargon, acronyms, and appropriation of some of the terms used in spheres of actual productive work ('feature injection' indeed!) Perhaps it represents an effort to fool yourselves and others that you are doing something that a semi-trained intern could not. My advice: Try producing something tangible, for once. You'll see not only how tough real work is, but how satisfying, when it works out right.
Re: Adjust as necessary
by Jochen Witte /
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Look at us, we're starting 9:30 and at 10:00 we start open up our eyes. 10:30h is stand-up meeting. I like my "local conditions" ;)
Re: Get a Real Job
by William Pietri /
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Hi, Andrew. I take it you've had some bad experience that leads you to say that?
There's no denying that bad managers use Agile terms to sound impressive and make trouble for others. I'm pretty sure, though, they were doing that long before the Agile movement arose, and long after something else becomes the hot topic. I try to fight it where I can, but it's a big world.
As to making things, the teams I coach ship software to real people regularly, on average once a week. That seems like real work to us, and it seems like real value to the people who use the software. That's pretty satisfying for all concerned.
too short
by Andrej Ruckij /
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i vote for longer sprints. in most cases there will be too much communication overhead, give people more room for uninterrupted work.