Keeping iteration/sprint planning meetings short
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009Iteration planning meetings can be a real drag. I have been in meetings that have dragged on all day: with estimating in particular seeming to last an eternity. It is particularly painful when this is all happening on a conference call with a globally distributed team (more on that in another post maybe). This is what the process was like at Huddle when I first introduced agile. We would have Iteration Retrospective, Iteration Demo and Iteration Planning all pretty much back to back. Iteration Planning would start with estimating all the highest priority stories, and adding them to the iteration until the iteration was full. On a bad day all if this could take the best part of a day, and was the part of the iteration that everyone dreaded - not to mention the amount of time it took up.