Of all the 8 retrospectives that we’ve had so far I found this one the least satisfying. It was gratifying see work done in the to demo, and good that Sarah introduced a new method for tracking the tickets as they get raised. It should help when we need to dip into the backlog, to see what the priorities are.
So the clients went away happy.
I was interested by Kev’s introduction to Cucumber and it’ll be good to see how what we’ve learnt about tests will help us to use it. Unfortunately I was less interested in the ‘cloud’. I find that the talk of the cloud is too amorphous at the moment, it COULD do a fantastic job of sorting out our content types and becoming a really responsive base for the entire project, and with Darrin’s stirling work and talent I’m sure it will.
I just don’t think that the retrospective was the place to talk about it. What happened to ‘show don’t tell’ ? I thought that was one of the guiding principles of Agile Development. I didn’t want to be rude and make Darrin feel that I’m not interested - because I am. I just don’t feel I can contribute to the cloud concept right now because I can’t get a good mental model. I don’t think explanations of the possibilities make it any easier for me to understand. I’m content to wait until there’s a bare bones thing that we can look at - I appreciate the desire to involve us and if talking the things through has helped then the retrospective has been very useful for Darrin. Just not for me.
The unfortunate side effect of this meant that we didn’t get to have recap on the week’s work. I thought we got a good amount of things done, clearing the decks ready for a good crack at the news tickets that have been sitting patiently for a while. We had a brief discussion on the nature of the site, and I think this arena is the place where we get each other’s opinions on what the site is and what it can become.
But heigh-ho, tomorrow is the planning for next week, and with a pile of precise story cards there should be plenty of work for all of us.
