Session 6

Planning Game for the Project

810:188
Agile Software Development

Hour 1 -- Team Plus Customer

... questions about homework. How far did you get? (... into parsing formulas.) What would you need to go farther? (... more knowledge of regular expressions or parsing.) Knowledge does matter!

... Planning Game.

• Introductory notes: project, details of this instane of the game.


• The team will begin to estimate stories. The unit of estimation will be 1.5 hours, which is roughly how much time we can count on in class each day to pair. Outside of class you will be putting in four or more hours each day, so this allows for two more pairing sessions out of class, for a total of up to three a day.

  Points of discussion: Will an estimate vary if we are implementing a story from scratch versus against a base of existing code? How, and how much? Will some stories help us get started better than others? How?

• The team studies the initial set of stories written up by the customer, and asks questions to understand them and the application better.

  Points of discussion: mechanics of accounting, both generally and in the customer's application; other needs of this customer: custom journals; accounts with names, numbers, and sub-accounts; periodic closing.

Hour 2 -- Team Minus Customer

The team talks about the stories and the application. Make and refine estimates for each story on the board.

Begin to develop minimal team coding standards. The only requirement defined by the instructor at this point is a file-level comment that tracks mods to the file by date and pair. This will facilitate in-studio communication.

Begin to plan out-of-class time: 1-2 sessions of ~1.5 hours out of class every day.

Leave the results of the meeting on the whiteboard, with marker and post-it notes.

Preparing for the Project (Leftover)

This section is a carryover from Session 5, left as context for the previous sections.

Over the next three weeks. we will grow the beginnings of a small accounting system. Here are some of the ideas that will be part of a complete system:

• set up a new set of books
  • accounts, with initial balances and optional subaccounts, for assets, liabilities, revenues, expenses, and net worth
  • journals for recording transactions, following stereotypical patterns and using common accounts
• create a new account in an existing set of books
• record a transaction in a journal
• close books for month
• close books for year
• produce balance sheet
• produce income statement
• some more advanced features I desire
  • import data from .xls, .qif, other standard format
  • rename an account
  • delete an account
  • create a new journal

Next time, we will write up stories for this system and play the Planning Game to decide what you will work on for our one release (end of the course) and our three iterations (end of each week).

Most of the significant stories will be written at the beginning of the project and divided into "must have", "nice to have", and "won't have" piles. We will draw up a tentative list of stories for the first iteration, and a less certain list of stories for the remaining iterations. As your customer, I will try to ensure a certain coherence among the priorities I set for the stories. I'll make tradeoffs among the priorities based on feedback of various kinds, including your work each iteration.

As the project goes on, we may add new stories, but in general we expect the number of stories under consideration to trend toward zero.

Wrap Up

• Reading. Watch a video of Ward Cunningham on the debt metaphor.

  Read an article by Jason Fried, Getting Real, Step 1: No Functional Spec.



• Programming. Study Ruby. One way to do that is...


• Homework. Write a one-page "story" a lá the 37signals piece that encapsulates your understanding at this point of the system we are building.