The 6th Principle.

"Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)" 
– That is the sixthof 12 principles upon which the agile manifesto was proclaimed. 

We, the Agilists of Eastern Iowa Agile, a meet up group, gather regularly in Cedar Rapids. During the last meeting at Kirkwood College, we had Richard Lawrence of ‘Agile for all’ (http://www.agileforall.com/ ) delivering for us.
It was an interesting workshop with no presentations. The entire gathering took part in opining and realizing the values of agile principle. As an interesting exercise, we were asked to pick most favorite 3 from 12 Agile principles. And we were discussing the pros and cons. But later at the end, we noticed for everyone’s surprise, no one had picked the 7th principle. Then Rick concluded that this should be actually obsolete today and the communication media should have replaced the need to meet face to face. A ground breaking manifesto of 2001 becomes obsolete in 2014.

But, I think a Taskboard full of activities should certainly make a difference in the mid set of teams to bring a healthy competition and would help the team members to understand their contribution in overall delivery, no matter they meet face to face or not. My team is well distributed across the US geography and we ensure that Task board is shared by all of us in scrum, every day. 

Because the HR theories of T-groups are still there in books and are found fruitful. So, the truth should be standing tall somewhere between Yes and No. May be…

Velocity – Significance of averaging.

As I was splitting the remaining/partially done stories to the next sprint I wondered what would happen to the story points. Because the task estimates are getting split and carried forward whereas the story point remains the same for both the sprints. 

Further, if a sprint is going to accumulate a few heavy stories from previous sprints and get credited in the current sprint then what would happen to the velocity? So, 

•It is important to consider the average velocity when you take a shot on SWAG.
•Story points completed in a sprint may not reflect the effectiveness of a sprint.

Story Points Vs Task Hours

Which one should be appropriate for capacity planning? Story Point or Task Hours. That was an interesting question raised by my client Manager when he was trying to get more resources to the team. 

My Answer was ‘Task Hours’. 

Story point in case of ‘capacity planning’ and Task hours if you are resource planning. Here is my justification: Story point is an unit that so specific to that team, organically evolved, normalized within the team. Whereas, the Task hours could be universal. I added, the story point unit signifies the ‘Unit of work, that could be ‘DONE’ by our team, using our technology, for our problems, within our time-box in our company during last few sprints’. 

Should he been planning for the current team I would have told him ‘story point’. But he was asking about the ‘future’ team, which had not yet taken part in determining the team’s story point units. Rather, he should have asked me ‘Which one should be appropriate for resource planning? Story Point or Task Hours’ I gently hinted that to him.

The Staging Sprint.

Well, you will find no google result for ‘Staging sprint’ related to agile. Because, I just named it couple of days back, when a client manager asked me what I would call this. I actually said ’Parking sprint..mmmm, Lets say Staging sprint’.

Yes, Staging sprint is the sprint where I park all the stories that would be handled in the NEXT sprint, every sprint. This enables me to,
• • Classify the stories for the next sprint. ( Earlier I used to navigate the backlog and hand pick them.. laborious)
  • Track the size ; so that I can say immediately, when to stop adding stories for next sprint (given that you know your velocity).

So, to conclude: the staging sprint is a sprint with no end date in which we will accumulate stories during a sprint, and move all the stories to the next sprint, while planning for a next sprint.

To illustrate, in a team that has monthly sprint, we collect stories to the staging sprint all along the month of March; and move all these stories to April sprint during sprint planning. It is true that team may choose to push a few stories back to Back log or to Staging sprint. Ie, team will keep a story in backlog if that story has a dependency or blocked OR move to staging sprint if that story could be handled in the month of May.

It was immediately adopted in other teams and being practiced.