After user story estimation the team met again to plan the first iteration. Again the whole team had to be present but everyone was there on time so the meeting started promptly.
“Our goal for this meeting is to plan our first iteration and release,” said Mary. “Because of the short timeline for the workshop the iteration itself will be incredibly short. As you know, for development projects you’d normally set aside anything from two to four weeks for the first iteration. Given the constraints we’re working under we want to review progress tomorrow. Basically we’ve got the rest of the day to work through some of the user stories.”
“How reasonable is that?” asked Daniel. “Doesn’t intense time pressure undermine good work?”
“Not always,” said Yi, “we already know we have limited time and a limited number of people available, so we will manage the only variable that it is reasonable to expect, scope. I prefer to under promise and over deliver.”
“If I could add,” said Neal, “we’re not creating a new technology here as such, but we are creating exercise projects for the volunteers to teach. I see these deliverables as one or two page guides to each exercise. There might be a student copy and a teacher’s copy.”
“But still…” said Daniel.
“Well I signed up for this, lets just get the planning done so we can move ahead with developing the material,” said Paraic.There was general agreement and so Mary proceeded.
“The first iteration deals with Primary Level students. Typically 4th/5th class students. We can’t assume these schools will have computing resources to install the LM PC/Mac development environment so this iteration will develop content material for the stand-alone option.”
“I don’t like to be the one complaining all the time but what’s this about the Mindstorms PC/Mac development environment?” asked Daniel.
“It should have been in your briefing packs,” said Neal. “Haven’t you installed it yet?”
“Neal, can you hand around copies of the NXT Software to the group?” suggested Mary. “Well add a story to the iteration plan
- Evaluate NXT Software v2.0 with Datalogging on Mac or PC
“Great,” said Daniel, “but we’ll need to install the software on our PCs and play around with it before we can talk about how to design the content for Second Level students, that is, assuming they have PCs in the classroom.”
“Let’s make sure it goes in the plan. Now what should we develop first?” asked Mary.
