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Day 11 - Stories, Stories, and More Stories

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We Were Busy
Today was an extraordinarily busy day in the timebox. We're in the midst of attending to revealing defects in our current release, some fairly significant configuration work to support America Inspired, reviewing tons of user stories, writing user stories, and continued work on setting up JIRA with Greenhopper to replace our ticketing system.

The Scrums
The day started out, as usual, with three scrums that cover the work our three distinct teams are working through. The scrums at this point are less about the developers telling us what they've worked on, what they are working on, and what blockers they have and more about the QA team reporting on results that have come through testing. We do look at our story board spreadsheet to confirm that stories are either green or nearly green. We also make hard decisions on features that might not be ready for release in the time box. Those are noted and we socialise that news with stakeholders as appropriate. We're also looking at any stories that might be at risk and identify alternate plans for those stories. That might comprise a) deferring the story for completion in the next timebox or b) completing the work during the QA week or c) releasing the new feature partially. Finally, the project management team got together for a scrum of scrums where we identify any problem areas that might have emerged.

Stories, Stories, and More Stories
This day quickly moved into several hours of team leads reviewing user stories with a great deal of detail. On or around the Backlog Mambo, the project team is giving a rough pointed estimate to the stories as they are completed. This is to have a general sense of the needed burn rate to compete the next timebox's work. It gives the Executive team a little more information to be able to prioritise the work. During the QA week, the development team is challenging these assumptions and either confirming or disputing the time frames. We're generally pretty good about our estimates. It is common for priorities to shuffle a bit during this period of time as well. Scope on one of our initiatives increased while we read through the stories and realised there were a fair number of cases that hadn't be identified and drawn up. There was, also, new functionality being discussed. All of this is fine as long as we have our stories nailed down along with the accompanying artifacts by the time we lock the timebox down. This sprint, it will happen on day 15 although during our normal sprint it occurs on day 19. We reviewed about half of the current user stories and pointed all of them. Looking at the needed burn rate, the list needs to go back to our Executive team for prioritization. User story review will continue on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Ideation, Performance, and Configuration! OH MY!
The day also had us looking at solutions to improve overall performance on the site. These conversations have ranged from reducing the amount of third party Java Script on the site to more agressive caching to creating a Boost-like flat HTML methodology. Stacey and I started the next timebox's planning for who will do what - the general breakdown of what our teams will look like this time round. One each, of our product managers, designers, QA member, developers, and I started new configurations in our staging environment to script out a process on the live site for support of the America Inspired initiative. There are many blocks to be configured, placed, and visibility settings to be tweaked. Articles will need to be grouped into the five areas and labeled correctly. In short, we're drawing up a plan for the next two phases of that program.

The Tickets
Finally, we are engaged in defining how our instance of JIRA will behave once we have finishing configuring it. This is requiring our reviewing each and every kind of task we engage in and defining workflows for each. It is a significant effort.

That rounds out Day 11 of our Agile timebox on this very large Drupal site.


Photo Credit on "User Story Template": jbeau on Flickr
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