2008-Apr-11 - Define Stage Feature List and 1st Iteration Kickoff

We held a workshop to determine the 1st stage feature list (SFL). Since our product manager is not at the same site as the development team, we decided to work out the SFL within the development team first, then send out to product manager for review.

What we did in the SFL workshop is like this:

The attendees of the workshop include developers, QAs, development manager, QA manager, project manager, and UI engineers.

First of all, we filter the categories of features in the full feature list (FFL) that would not be implemented in the 1st stage.

For the remaining categories, all of the attendees have to score each single feature by its implement priority - score 3 for high, 2 for medium, and 1 for low. At the same time anyone can give an explanation for why he scored that point. Each role stands from his point of view to decide the priority. And as a QA, we tried to figure out the simplest story that an end user can try out our service at once.

After going through all the features in FFL, we got a total priority score for each feature. Then we sorted them descendingly, and review the top 20 highest priority features to check whether they make sense.

Then we sent the list of features with priority order decided by development team to our product manager. To our surprise, his feedback was totally different from our feature list. The product manager focused more on the infrastructure and high availability stuff. So we combined his feedback and adjusted our SFL for the 1st stage. We focused on a more scalable structure and high availability, and only kept the simplest feature that user could use.

After decided the SFL, we kicked off the 1st iteration by starting estimating the 1st stage schedule. Here is how we did this:

The attendees are the same as SFL workshop except UI engineers because they were shared resources and would not be in critical path.

First of all, we separated 3 phases for each feature implementation - design / test environment preparation, coding and unit test / automation test coding, bug fixing / testing. You can see that each phase involves task for developer and QA. So we estimated the working hours for each phase of each feature in the SFL respectively by developer and QA. And we found the critical path. The sizing and time estimation was mainly based on experience, kind of intuitive and conservative though.
After that, we also assigned owners to each task, trying to balance all engineers' effort.
Of course, finally we added buffer time (about 20%) and the time for other stuffs such as full cycle test and regression test. 

And that's how we planned our 1st iteration.