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.