Iteration Planning and Estimating

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Planning with the customer is an important part of the process. In XP we expect our team to take responsibility for estimates, so we give them the right to make their own. The iteration planning session includes everyone from development and focuses on five key topics.

Discussing Stories

Here the customer reads the stories to the team and the team asks questions about them. Short stories are expanded to describe in detail what is to be created.

Assigning Stories

Stories are championed by team members . Every story has a champion who is primarily responsible for its completion.

Revising Estimates

Developers revise the estimate of time to complete the story if necessary. It is never a bad thing to tell the project manager or strategist that her gross estimate was off. You just have to say why.

Determining Content Requirements

All required content from the customer is itemized, and strategies to get the content are agreed on. This is an opportunity for the customer to back out of a story that may have too high a demand on his time.

Risk Analysis and Management

What will cause our estimates to fail? This is an opportunity to look at risks associated with stories. Are we using an unproven technology? Are we relying on a third party for content? Here we look at the potential risks and jointly decide what to do if the worst does happen.

In the next sections we lay out the first few iterations of a Web project. If you are familiar with XP, you will quickly see that our approach is far more constrained than what XP proposes. This is for two reasons. First, teams that have never done XP will likely find this guide smoothing their transition by ensuring that at the end of iteration 3, they have a good foundation across graphic design and functionality. Second, Web sites are not object oriented. In Part III we will see how to impose a pseudo-object model on Web pages. These iterations are constrained to accommodate this structure. More than rules, they are themes about how to get started and how to minimize risks.

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