Specifications
In order to develop the project as well as possible, we should always follow the specifications which evolve during the weekly meetings. The Specifications evolutions must follow some rules:
- The Specifications must be updated each week or, at least, after each sprint.
- The Specifications are decided by the entire team and tasks are planned with a Planning Poker (revisited).
- After the Planning Poker, these tasks can not be cancelled or re-sheduled during the sprint.
- Once tasks are fixed, the KanBoard must be updated with the new tasks.
- After the sprint, we can reverse some features in the next sprint and if the reverse is accepted during the Planning Poker.
The project is designed around the three words "Talk", "Vote" and "Sprint!".
- Talk : Every developer must expose ideas of new features or enhancements.
- Vote : Every developer must vote for the new features we are going to develop.
- Sprint! : Every developer must ...develop.
In order to never stop the development and the Talk sessions, we adopted the following pattern of work.
Ideas must be discussed during the weekly meetings (also called Talk sessions). In order not to break the development, we try to talk about new features during the current sprint. This aims to having a new sprint phase ready once the current one is over. When the current sprint is going to end, or if we have discussed many new features, we switch to the vote session also known as Planning Poker.
The Planning Poker is a game that occurs at the end of every sprint. It allows us to vote and discuss on new features that we are going to work on during the next sprint. The team only has a few members, so we decided to adapt the rules of the Poker as follows:
- Someone in the team is chosen to remind us the tasks we talked about during the previous Talk sessions.
- We all take three tokens with a value of 1,3 and 5 points.
- After the Planning Poker, only 3 tasks will be chosen.
- We secretely vote for features we want to develop (3 tokens so 3 features max for each dev).
- We expose, at the same time, the features with the associated value.
- If a task was unanimously voted (no matter the value of the tokens) then, it is automatically added to the tasks to do in the next sprint. The token used on this task are removed from the game.
- At this point, if three tasks were unanimously voted (no more tokens in game), then the game is over and the three tasks are chosen.
- If a task was unanimously voted, the tokens used on this task are removed from the game and placed to the center of the table.
- For each task that were not unanimously voted, we discuss them and try to understand why we should or should not do these tasks.
- We vote again with the remaining tokens.
- After the second vote, unanimously voted tasks are automatically chosen, followed by tasks with the bigger score.