AGILE IN ACTION: XPDAY5: Before Iteration Zero

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

XPDAY5: Before Iteration Zero

This session was presented by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce. It's purpose was to allow all project stakeholders to explore what needs to be done before agile development can commence. The session synopsis posed a number of thought provoking questions:

What must be considered before the first development iteration?
What place does analysis have in an agile process?
How much design do we need to do up front?
How do we set up the tools and working environment to support the project?
How do we ensure that lines of power and responsibility are aligned for success?
How do we build a cooperative relationship with users based upon continual learning?

The session kicked off with a cafe-style brainstorming session where groups of people sitting around tables shared their experiences, and identified things that were in place at the start of a project and things that were missing. These were written on colour coded index cards to reflect 'good' and 'bad'. The group then scattered the cards on the floor and, working collectively, started to group them logically.

Grouping the cards
Originally uploaded by sjb140470.

The logical groups that emerged were:

Build and test
Infrastructure and workspace
Managing expectations
Project governance
Roles and responsibilites
team building

Each group of index cards was then collected by Nat and returned to a table.

Collecting the grouped cards
Originally uploaded by sjb140470.

The people sitting at each table were responsible for distilling the information and creating a poster that presented a list of items, for the given topic, that should be in place before iteration zero. People then circulated around the tables to discuss each poster.