AGILE IN ACTION

Showcases are great PR opportunities with the customer and friends (other stakeholders). We want the showcase to be meaningful for the customer and we want the customer to be engaged. So we rehearse a few times to come up with the smoothest running order and an entertaining narrative for demonstrating the stories.

We learned in the very early days to treat everything as a PR opportunity with the customer. So the showcase is a big thing for us. We run showcases every Tuesday. We prepare the demo environment with real-world data, put together an entertaining narrative that introduces and connects the new features for users, and rehearse it all a few times to ensure the showcase is a valuable and meaningful experience for the customer.

Almost everything for us is now a pomodoro. Some time ago we replaced the per-iteration planning game with on-demand planning pomodoros and the end-of-iteration retrospective with a pomodoro retrospective.

In our team, developers create the vast majority of the automated tests, whether they are acceptance tests, integration tests, or unit tests. They do this because they are story test-driven. They develop stories from the outside in, starting with the user interface and are guided by the acceptance criteria. The developers profile their code and create automated performance and load tests as they go because code has to be production-ready at the end of every 1-week iteration. Testers in our team do exploratory testing and they're free to pair-up with anyone, another tester or more likely a developer, to create any automated tests they feel are missing. The testers, however, add value to the team that goes way beyond testing. Working closely with the Product Owner they facilitate connection and collaboration with the customer, helping the team to empathize with users, understand their needs and appreciate value from their perspective. Working with the facilitator they help the team develop a conscience that is focused on the delivery of value and quality, while their continuous interactions within the team keep collaboration high.

Showcase is popular Originally uploaded by sjb140470

It can be hard to look ahead at what's coming in the next iteration when you're so busy in the current iteration. It sounds easy, just go look at the story cards at the top of the product backlog and have a conversation about them with the product owner. But it isn't easy. You might grab a peek every now and again when you come up for air, but you might not get the time to follow-up with the product owner.

The showcase provides a visible and honest demonstration of the team's progress to the customer. It presents an opportunity for the team to obtain feedback and seek acceptance from the customer on the iteration's stories. It provides closure for the iteration. We use 1-week iterations and our showcases typically take 10 to 15 minutes. Here's the basic format:

The iteration is a fixed timebox. And the showcase provides an opportunity to seek acceptance from the customer. It provides closure for the iteration, which can then be reflected upon in a retrospective. To maintain rhythm, it's important that the iteration review is held at the same time, on the last day of the iteration. Don't delay or postpone it. Respect the timebox.

In a previous iteration we experienced a bit of a crunch leading up to the showcase with our product owner, which resulted in a 1-hour slip to the iteration review. Not catastrophic admittedly, but this broke our rhythm and it's disappointing that we let it happen. How did this happen? On the penultimate day of the iteration we completed the stories that we committed to deliver in the iteration planning game, so we agreed with the product owner to bring forward the next 2 stories, each estimated at 1 ideal pair day. The team was so focused on getting the 2 additional stories done that it basically lost track of time.