Communications

I l @ ve RuBoard

Keeping the team informed about the progress of the project is essential to success and adds to the members ' sense of project ownership. The problem is that everyone wants to get on with his own tasks , and meetings, which are often seen as time wasters , are not popular. The solution we have developed is the use of regular, short, standup meetings.

We do a 15-minute standup meeting every morning. A corkboard has all the story cards for an iteration on it. We use it to discuss the stories the team worked on the previous day and to get a brief status report on how they are coming along. We revise the time estimate for current stories and reevaluate if the new estimates will require us to drop some stories from the iteration or allow us to add more. In either case the customer selects which stories to add or remove.

All members of the team are at the daily standup meeting and report on how they are doing. We find that discussion of the stories creates tangential discussions. Important ones tend to move into a room with a white board immediately after the standup meeting, while the trivial ones fizz out once the meeting breaks up.

I l @ ve RuBoard