Getting free pizza from your Boss
Today was an exciting day, We just finished a two weeks sprint in 8days. This was strange for us because this time, we had one man down, one man transferred to another department and somehow, we managed to pull this off.
This is not the first time we promised that a sprint will take two weeks. By now, someone might be wondering - what is he talking about? what is a sprint. Not to worry, a sprint is a short time commitment a team makes towards delivering an agreed amount of work. It is a term popular in agile software teams running on steroids. Roughly 6weeks ago, we committed to delivering a set amount of work in two weeks. We had the usual sprint planning meeting with our product manager and designer and we agreed - though grudgingly - we agreed, I can't believe we did agree.
Two weeks ago, the mercury team set a target to deliver a new feature which we believe would up delivery time by over 40%. This means that more than 40% of our customers would be likely get their packages 35% less time than before. We were all beaming with smiles and wanted to achieve this. So with enough motivation - the general zeal towards doing good, we began the sprint. We spent most of the first day arguing, naming variables and data columns, agreeing on api endpoints and contracts and of cos celebrating my new car :)
So how did we pull this off?
Day 1: Argue a lot
Day 2 - 4: Complete 80% of the work
Day 5 - 7: Man down :( Write a tonne of unit tests
Day 8: Bash the hell out of Q/A :) and hound our PM for pizza
And that's it, that's today's article.
