One of the common tasks when working in an agile environment is pointing stories, its essential that the team and the product owner get together and decide on how much effort something is going to take. We had a meeting scheduled today at work to do just this, 4 stories that needed pointing so they could be put in the backlog, all pretty straight forward right?
Like all good agile practitioners, we set out some guidelines at the start of the meeting. We would time box each story discussion at 8 minutes and then move on. As well, we decided that each team member would take turns reading one of the stories so that everyone was involved and engaged. We started out well and made some progress but it was obvious that things were coming off the rails, and fast. Team members were getting frustrated, a couple of members were just pointing stories really high because they weren’t understanding the business value that each story conveyed (the product owner was present, and the team had met previously and discussed the stories in a brain storming capacity), the product owner was getting more and more frustrated, the team members quickly lost interest and everyone left the room feeling a bit worse for the participating.
I thought I would highlight some of the issues and try to address them:
History repeating
Some of the team members had worked on implementing the feature that we were pointing in the meeting in a past iteration of the project. The attempt failed costing the team of 3 people a months worth of time. It was obvious that this weighed heavily on those specific members and it was influencing there estimates. Understandably one can be sympathetic of this attitude, failing at the same thing over and over again is demoralizing and soul crushing. The thing is that scrum accounts for failure as long as you learn from it, I think though that this issue is a very difficult one to get past and I can’t really criticize too harshly on the topic.
Breaking the law
After the first story was done and pointed in the time allotted, we quickly ran overtime on the second and it just got worse for each subsequent story. We had completely ignored what we all agreed on at the start of the meeting and it turned a 30 minute exercise into a 90 minute marathon. I think in this case sticking to what we agreed to at the start would have made for a much more satisfying meeting, I think the desire to please the product owner and get the stories point outweighed the obvious fact that we weren’t doing a good job pointing them. I think in retrospect we should have just stopped the meeting and moved onto other work and reconvened another day, it probably would have saved a lot of people a lot of time and energy. This is something to try next time for sure.
A couple of interesting things happened later in the day that this meeting took place, my co-worker Jason Little wrote a blog post talking about this exact topic (I think the meeting had a pretty deep impact on all involved), go check his post out .
The other interesting thing is that I caught a tweet on twitter that stated “storming is the most interesting part of team formation”. This kinda made me think for a second, so I Googled the term and came to this interesting wikipedia page. The really interesting bit for me is the entry on storming:
The storming stage is necessary to the growth of the team. It can be contentious, unpleasant and even painful to members of the team who are averse to conflict. Tolerance of each team member and their differences needs to be emphasized. Without tolerance and patience the team will fail. This phase can become destructive to the team and will lower motivation if allowed to get out of control.
This so quantified the exact feelings I was having about the meeting, it really reassured me that this is a normal process and it eventually leads to bigger and better things. It certainly made me feel much better about the situation and that we can and will progress past that stage onto more productive and fulfilling team situations.
Nothing good to report about week 3 : ( I seriously struggled getting through all the sets each day (I literally couldn’t finish all the sets for any of the days this week. So it is with great shame that I confess I will be repeating week 3 (in fact I will repeat it until I can do all the sets without struggle). It feels a bit strange that I was doing ok for week 1 and week 2 and really ran into a wall for week 3, but I’ll work through it and hopefully will be on week 4 next week!
As a side note, and maybe the reason why I’m struggling a bit. I’ve started doing bicycle crunches on the days that I’m not doing pushups, I’ve started with doing about 40 (2 sets of 20). I’m wondering if this is tiring me out for my pushup days?
Things I learned on twitter is this silly idea I came up with while driving into work one day, the idea is that there is a wealth of maybe not so popular news, personal interactions and other insight into people’s lives that you can only find on twitter. I decided to start logging some of those things and will post them every so often here. I have some plans to make this into a more automated process but let’s not get a head of our selves.
Continuing the trend of keeping myself accountable to sticking with the hundred push up program, I’ve completed week 2! Nothing terribly exciting to report back, I’m definitely feeling stronger and noticing that I’m not as sore after finishing the sets. One thing I am looking for is a simple add-on to the current program, something that would target my belly (oh it needs some targeting). Other then that things are going great, here’s looking forward to week 3!
All went well except for a short internet outage which left my blog in an error’d state for a few minutes. Just upgrading plugins and testing out the google gears integration stuff. Let me know if you see anything broken!
As promised, I’m posting about my first week of doing the hundred push up training program. As I noted I did score pretty high in the initial test, and I started in the bracket that aligned with my initial score but quickly realized I should drop down to the middle tier and go with that first. After doing the first day at the highest level I was really sore for the next 2 days. This indicated to me that it would make a lot of sense to drop down and use the lower level to build up strength.
I’ve found that doing the set’s of push ups in the morning works best for me. I do the routine just before I get into the shower every morning, so far I’ve been doing Monday, Wednesday and Friday which is perfect for me and it’s been going well. Dropping down to a lower level might be a little easier in the short term but as I’ve mentioned previously I’m in this for the long haul so going down to a lower level to build up strength definitely works for me.
All in all the first week has been great and I’m looking forward to many more weeks of building strength and shedding a couple of pounds!
On July 4th of this year, my wife, 3 kids and I moved into a new house. It’s not the first house we owned but with a family the size of mine the smaller house we were living in was just not going to scale with us. My son already took over my basement office for his bedroom and it was literally impossible to do anything in the place without stepping on one of the kids or worrying about waking the youngest up.
We are absolutely in love with our new place, it’s a lot bigger in terms of square footage and the yard is 4 times the size of our old house (yes, lot’s more mowing for dad but I don’t mind). With all the excitement and looking forward to the new place, the harsh reality of actually moving all of our stuff set in pretty quick at the beginning of the month, and shortly after we got everything moved it dawned on me that this would be a perfect opportunity for a retrospective!
What went well?
- Advanced preparation – My wife is an absolute maniac when it comes to preparation and planning, she had the entire house packed and ready to go about 2 weeks before the actual move. We ate off paper plates and used plastic cutlery and cups for the last 2 weeks in the house. Maybe not the best for the environment but it certainly helped our sanity. This would be my number one piece of advice for anyone planning a large move. Pack early so that you can focus on just the moving part when the day comes.
- Reserve a truck in advance – And by advance I mean way in advance. I went down to the local Uhaul 2 months before the move date and reserved a truck. The last thing you need is to be trying to track a moving truck down a week or two before the actual move date, that is stress you will not need!
- Get the biggest truck possible – We got a massive 26 foot beast of a truck, we thought it might have been overkill but it wasn’t. We managed to squeeze just about everything into that house on wheels and it sure beat making multiple trips!
- Understand what you will need on closing day – This was pretty easy for us as this is the second house we have bought plus our real estate agent is a close friend so there were no surprises going into the lawyers to get everything signed. If it’s your first home, find a friend who’s bought before and get as much info from them as possible, also lean on your real estate agent for some inside information on what you will need for the closing costs etc.
- If you have kids, get them out of the house for the move – We were fortunate enough that my Mom offered to take the kids not just for the moving day, but for the day before and the weekend after. I can’t imagine what it would have been like trying to move with 3 kids running around, in fact I don’t even want to think about it
What didn’t go well?
- Not enough help – We both drastically underestimated how much help we would need with the move. We also moved on a Friday which makes it difficult for most of your friends and family to help. This is another piece of advice that I would offer to anyone doing a sufficiently large move. Ask at least double the number of people you think you will need to help you move. This will account for the last minute cancellations that are inevitable.
What to try next time?
- Get more help then you need – As noted above, the more help the better. I actually ended doing 80% or more of the move on my own (boxes and such). I had a couple of people to help with the big furniture but I sure could have used more help.
- Hire movers – I doubt we will be moving again any time soon, but mark my words the next time we move I will be hiring professional movers to do the heavy lifting. It might cost a pretty penny but your back (and every other muscle in your body) will thank you for it.
All in all I would say this move was a pretty smooth and successful one. If you have any stories (good and bad) leave a comment!
This week I’ll be starting the 100 Pushup Training program. The first step in the program is determining what rank I fall in for the program. I did the initial test this morning and was able to eek out 16 pushups, according to the guidelines found on the website, for my age and the number of push ups performed I fall into the highest category!
All that aside, I think I’m going to do 6 weeks at the level below and then 6 weeks at the highest level, I don’t want to push it too hard and hurt myself and I’m really interested in a longer term program that I can keep up. Heck, I might even drop it down to the lowest level and do all 3 levels over the course of 18 weeks, we’ll see how I feel tomorrow morning :).
I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled on the 100 Push ups Training Program, but it immediately caught my attention as something I could integrate into my existing exercise program (note: my current exercise program consists of nothing more then waking up every morning). The frequency and pace of the program seemed like something I could handle so I’m going to get started. You basically go through a steadily increasing routine of pushups, 3 times a week for 6 weeks, I think it’s an achievable goal and I have a plan for sticking to it.
One of my favourite blogger’s Leo Babauta of Zen Habits offers some great advice on staying motivated to achieve a goal, basically the idea is that to hold myself accountable to this goal I’ll post a weekly update on my progress through the program.
Here’s to the gun party at the end!
Thought I would repost something I wrote for my companies blog here, it’s exciting news and I thought it would be appropriate to share!
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