Agile Meeting Practices: Visible Indicators, Retrospectives, Time Boxed Work, and Ice Cream

A lot was riding on a recent planning and estimating meeting. The big launch is coming up, and we needed to plan out several enhancements to a client’s custom application – refine business logic, create tasks and estimate hours for those tasks. Once again, Agile practices gave us the tools to do the work at hand.

The first thing I wanted to do was to keep awareness focused on what we needed to complete in that meeting. Instead of a written agenda printed out or on the projection screen, I grabbed a tall whiteboard in the corner and wrote out the list of features to estimate. Earlier that week my client had given me the priority of each feature, so I also wrote in a number to indicate High or Medium priority. We were definitely going to plan the High priority features, and get to as many Medium items as possible. This was effectively the Product Backlog for the project, a collection of features that would be implemented based on business priority.

As we completed each item, I walked across the room and crossed it off the list. (Often with a gratuitous fist pump and “Hoo ha!”) This whiteboard was my “highly visible indicator”.

We noticed that the first feature took a relatively long time to estimate. There was too much discussion over each task, and it was being over-architected. This was noted and acknowledged by the group – we effectively had a retrospective at 30 minutes into the meeting. The solution was suggested that we use a timer, so someone grabbed his iPod with the timer application. Each feature set estimated after that went progressively smoother and required less conversation because the discussion was focused on concise, relevant communication. We attained velocity because we time boxed our work. The highest praise for me was to hear a developer say, “I didn’t think we were going to get through that list.” I did think we were going to do it, and he eventually was able to share my vision.

So where does ice cream come into this? In my experience, keeping a light and somewhat playful project atmosphere energizes the team. This meeting was 3.5 hours long, nearly the entire afternoon. Agile is about keeping a sustainable pace and encourages humane practices. My interpretation of this was to have two breaks during the long afternoon, and for the second we had a tasty frozen dairy treat to look forward to.