Week in Review #9

  • Monday - The day did not start well, and it continued to be pretty blah.  I shall blame the weather. I should have been a plumber.
  • Tuesday - Listened to the first episode of the new Base.cs podcast on the way to work. Great start! Also the first episode of the Hurry Slowly podcast, at which I found myself nodding enthusiastically a lot. Today we had sprint review and retrospectives; had to skip the all-team retro meeting due to a shortage of meeting space (which is a constraint that drives me crazy). My goal for the team retrospective was to try a new technique; I started with sailboat and did a brief post about that experience.
  • Wedesday - More podcasts! Meta-cast 122 today, a really fun and interesting rapid-fire stream of questions. Lots to think about, and I should probably listen to it again. Also, it was sprint planning day.We had the following challenges:
    • A late-breaking change of time from when we usually have this meeting, to accommodate an all-hands meeting at the other corporate office. This had the effect of several people being late (including the product owner!), so we had to repeat discussions on a couple of items. 
    • I mentioned that velocity was off pretty sharply from the baseline we had finally established, and suggested that the teams think about that when we broke up to plan out each team's sprint. Holy defensiveness, Batman. 
    • A brand-new high-priority bug that hadn't been looked at by anyone in the team for grooming turned up at the top of the backlog. Fortunately it turned out to be a simple item, but I find this particular pattern very frustrating. We have two-week sprints; it seems to me that there should be vanishingly few problems that are so bad that they can't wait two weeks.
    • We have a huge indigestible lump of feature work in the backlog, currently blocked by a single ticket that didn't get finished last sprint. Until we can get that one working, none of this other stuff can be done, but it's the highest priority work we have right now. Again, frustrating, if only because I disagree with the way we're approaching this work, which represents a major project within our product group (and extending into another product group).
    • The teams were previously promised that November would see a break in the string of frequent releases that have turned our teams into (complaining) release managers instead of feature developers. When all is said and done, November will have seven releases in it. Le sigh.  
    • Decompressed by starting to read Crucial Conversations, which I have seen recommended. (I think it was by Ryan Ripley.)
  • Thursday -Listened to another Hurry Slowly episode about connecting with nature; starting to feel like I should be able to distill a lot of this information into a set of practices. Worked from home, trying to figure out a strategy for documentation to work with a new delivery architecture. Meeting at 4:30 announced massive re-org, so now I have no idea what my teams are going to look like in the future. Whee? Found another free "learn to code" site.
  • Friday - Documented EDI file formats until my head started to actually spin. Went for a walk, thought about my future company; picking names is fun. Met new team manager and gave him an overview of where we keep things in JIRA and the sprint structure. Pleased to find that he had actually thought about documentation as part of the new architecture; not everyone thinks about documentation. 
It's been quite a week!

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