Iteration 1 is over
We said we would be open about how we are doing and so it seemed only right to share exactly how our planning an development process is getting on. We (Isotoma) are Agile developers. Part of our version of the Agile methodology is to use Mike Cohn's excellent approach for estimating. To that end we spent approximately a week with Mark developing a total of 141 user stories that describe the way that the application works. We then broke them down by feature and priority until we had a set that we could usefully work with that included all the things that might go into the first iteration and then we played planning poker (zip file) to get down to our core stories for iteration 1.
Iteration 1 is now complete, and this is how we did:
| Story ID | Story | Est. Points |
|---|---|---|
| 50 | As a user I will always have a status bar showing what I am currently listening to | 1 |
| 78 | As a music fan, I can see photographs from Flickr in the photo tool | 1 |
| 83 | As a music fan, I will see MusicBrainz lists of releases in the discography tool | 0 |
| 84 | As a music fan, I will see MusicBrainz lists of tracks in the discography tool | 1 |
| 85 | As a music fan, I will have access to a tool showing photos relating to my current context | 2 |
| 87 | As a music fan, I will have access to a tool showing the biography for my current context | 2 |
| 88 | As a music fan, I will have access to a tool showing a discography for my current context | 2 |
| 95 | As a music fan, I will have access to a tool showing products, merchandise and music for my current context that is available for purchase | 2 |
| 107 | As a music fan, I will see links to allmusic biographies in the biography tool | 1 |
| 108 | As a music fan, I will see wikipedia biographies in the biography tool | 5 |
| 110 | As a music fan, I will see US & UK amazon listings in the products tool | 3 |
| 139 | As a music fan, I will have access to a tool showing other releases on which this track is present | 2 |
| 140 | There will be a local copy of the musicbrainz database installed,configured and tested | 5 |
As both Doug and I have blogged about, getting MusicBrainz up and running and correctly identifying tracks proved considerably harder than we thought. We had estimated a velocity of 27 story points in 14 days and achieved those points in 15.5. Not bad, particularly as knowing what we now know I would re-esimate the MusicBrainz related stuff as about 3 times as much.
Iteration 2 will be 16 days (looking like 30 story points). I'll write up which ones we are tackling after our next planning session.