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This is a repost of a series of article I originally published on Songbird’s blog

Previously, we’ve examined the new development practices that the Songbird team adopted to plan and track a release. Everyone on the team was very eager to put them to the test. Unfortunately, at the time, we were still in the middle of the 0.3 release cycle and new work could only be started once that release was completed. During the 0.3 release, everything was still treated as a bug, but in fact, many bugs were stories and tasks in disguise. We decided to apply some of the newly defined tracking principle to help us guide and finish the cycle, so we could start fresh with our next release as soon as possible.

Cuánto es?

The first step was to add cost to everything. We introduced a new cost field in Bugzilla and put a cost value on everything according to our new scale of 1, 2 and 3 points. With costing in place, we were in a position to compute how much points the team was able to complete in a typical work week. That total, normalized per work day became our team velocity.

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It’s only been 48 hours since I finished the Tour of the California Alps, also known as the Death Ride and I’ve been feeling the pressure to share all the gory details. So here ya go.

Joe, Jay and I setup for an early start. We figured we wanted to leave plenty of time to make the check points and finish the ride. We had a great carbo load dinner at Passaratti’s the night before and set the alarm for 4 am. We arrived at the Turtle Rock park shortly after 5 am. There was already a lot of people there as everyone was trying to get a headstart. The temperature was warmer than expected and after much debate about what to wear, we were ready to roll at 5:30, heading south towards Monitor Pass.

The day was off to a good start. The sky cleared up from smoke the day before and we were all happy to finally see some blue sky and clouds. Lake Tahoe had seen some pretty bad air quality recently, so bad that several events got cancelled, including the Donner Lake Triathlon the day before.
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This is a repost of a series of article I originally published on Songbird’s blog.

This is the first post of a 3 part series presenting our experience moving Songbird development to an Agile process.

Drowning in the waterfall

Up until version 0.3, Songbird development had been following a fairly traditional waterfall model. Realizing the ambitious vision of building both a platform and a desktop media player has presented many challenges. A lot of plumbing infrastructure is needed before any features can be created. Faced with that challenge, the engineering team did what engineers do best, they designed a very comprehensive system, planned for it very carefully and started cranking code.

During the planning phase, the team estimated the work to the best of their abilities and a Gantt chart was created to reflect identified dependencies and track progress. Unfortunately, this approach led to lengthy release cycles (10-12 months) with lots of room for scope creep. When the release finally got completed, lots of good work was accomplished (over 1200 issues where addressed in 0.3 alone) but the lack of visibility was problematic and the slow pace of releases was too demoralizing.

We recognized that the schedule was build on assumption that we knew everything upfront. There was a sentiment that the whole Gantt thing was a little removed from the actual work and that overall “things were going ok, because we were kind of tracking it” was not an acceptable way to run our project. We had to accept that our planning and scheduling practices were broken.

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