After some time off I return to our XP simulation where I attempt to implement a little messaging application. For the iteration ahead there is only one story planned: “A user can send a text message to another user - the console version.” The story is estimated at 5 points. We have a good idea of what this story entails as we have an acceptance test that describes the details.

We begin by planning the iteration by breaking down the story that is up on the white board into tasks for the developers. We estimate those tasks as best we can. When estimating the tasks we don’t use an abstract notion like story points; a simple time estimate will do. None of the tasks should take a lot of time to do, it should be a matter of hours or, at maximum a day.

When we created the user stories we did our best to ignore dependencies. When we plan the tasks for the iteration, we allow ourselves to acknowledge that there is an order to how certain things ought to be implemented. It does make sense to make two applications connect to each other before we attack sending messages between them.

This is the first iteration so we don’t have a good idea of how much we can accomplish in one iteration. My gut feeling tells me that we probably could squeeze more into one iteration, but let’s wait with that until we have marked some tasks as “done” and have a better grip on our velocity. History has proven me to sometimes be too optimistic.

Here’s the project white board after we’ve done the iteration plan:

The next thing to attack: connecting two applications.