Note to Self 12 – Lessons Learned from Our Latest Project

I know I’m supposed to be releasing my IterHelper tool right now, but I’ve been on a bit of death march lately and have had no time. Though the project hasn’t ended yet, there are some items that I need to store away for future use before they’re forgotten.

• On small teams, non-development related responsibilities should be divided among the team. Then the single non-dev responsibility (hopefully it’s the only one) should always take precedence over development responsibilities. It sounds backwards, but no matter what my priorities, I’m always going to find a way to write code. The same isn’t true of project management.
• I can’t say enough about having a non-developer - who I’ll refer to as the Customer Advocate – on the project team. Things we had problems making time for – client meetings and acceptance testing for instance – fell to the Customer Advocate which takes a lot of pressure off everyone else.
• Story points are great, but in order to get value out of them you actually have to use them – obvious, I know. Estimating tasks and then tracking how many points were completed daily, turned an out of control project into a manageable one.
• Speaking of scoring, I wish we would have re-scored each task after we completed it. It would have taken minimal effort while at the same time providing us with enough information to improve our estimates.
• We started using Agile Zen at the beginning of our project, but eventually abandoned it in favor of physical notecards. This introduced a lot of challenges, but it did allow us to grow our process exactly the way we wanted it. The added benefit is we’re in a much better position to evaluate the various kanban applications for our next project. To be clear, Agile Zen is a great product it just wasn’t what we needed at the time.
• We didn’t use Selenium or Watir to run acceptance tests. Even if we couldn’t run all the tests we wanted, it would have been a huge time saver. A costly mistake that won’t be repeated.