Morgan's Raid, Sprint 9

Sprint 9 ended last Friday, and the team is doing great. Starting with the Spring semester, we are not using Google Docs for the Product and Sprint Backlogs, since now we have a persistent space in which to work. Since I don't have an electronic log of activity, then, it has become important that I archive a few of the details here.

In the burndown chart, green is steady progress and blue is actual progress. The bump around Monday and Wednesday coincides with the big ice storm, and the fact that we only had such a small bump is a testament to the team's commitment. A few team members were able to come to campus that Wednesday afternoon to hammer out the most ambitious part of the sprint: the implementation of the new raiding system. Others continued to work from home, using email and chat to keep in touch.

The team's total estimate of hours ended up being fairly accurate, although the specific allocation of estimated hours to tasks was off by quite a bit. The team recognized this and agreed to draw upon this experience in the Sprint 10 Planning Meeting. This meeting happened on Monday, but I still know nothing about it since I was at the strategic planning roundtable retreat. I left the team with a prioritized Product Backlog, and I'm eager to see how they chose user stories and broke them down into tasks.