Agile is two days old at Reality Check, and I already have cool graphs.
For the last couple of weeks, three of us have been putting together a way to manage the technical projects. We split the company into two teams and started using two-week sprints.
The process is simple enough on paper:
- The product owner and executives decide which needs matter most.
- Each need becomes a user story.
- The team breaks the story into tasks that should take no more than four hours.
- Every task gets an owner, an estimate, and a clear definition of done.
- Each day, people update the remaining time and talk about what is blocked.
The project system turns that into a burn-down chart. That chart is supposed to be our main gauge for whether the work is moving on the time frame everybody committed to.
Each team also picks one daily scrum time. Same time every day. Say what happened yesterday, what happens today, and what is in the way.
One of the founders hates the interface. Good news: he should almost never have to touch it.
I walked the team through it myself. Within about fifteen minutes, one person was already showing me things I had not noticed. The first couple of days have produced at least three useful items.
We need a lot more in the backlog. I want at least three months of real stories available before the next priority meeting. Otherwise the sprint starts with whatever we remembered that morning.
It is early. The sprints are going well so far.
And the graphs look cool.