Phoenix First Two XP Sprints

Phoenix has finished its Sprint 5 and 6, which are the first two XP Sprints.

An XP team always goes through four stages, "forming, storming, norming, performing". The first Sprint felt like a storming stage, where we are trying to figure out the best way to get the code in without spending too much time on upfront design. At the same time, we are also getting used to paired programming.

Even though paired-programming has become an old trick for me, I still feel that my pairing skill has gotten worse during the past three years of working solo. The second Sprint felt a lot better, and I am hoping to keep this trend.

Items that worth noting:

• We modified the lava lamp to have a green light on when everything is good. Even though it is redundant, it has very positive effect among us. The only thing we might need to watch out is that someone mentioned that they could be fire hazard because the lamp gets very hot at the end of the day. So we are going to turn them off by the end of the day. This is when I found out that the X10 remote controller does not work, so they are back for replacement now.
• The lava lamps are helping us getting on the habit of treating broken tests as the highest priority. Due to the nature of Phoenix, we got some interesting test breakage already. We got tests that only break on the server, tests that only break on Linux, and a test that hung. One interesting discovery is that each time we are forced to figure out what is wrong and fix them, our tests ended up making better sense and being more like behavior driven, and I was planning on settling for hacks to keep the test passing!
• At the beginning of the project, we chose to create just enough stories to get us through the first Sprint, then created a few more for the second Sprint. Looking back, I think that is a good choice. The kind of stories that we create now are so much different but better from the earlier ones. I think that is because at the beginning, your system has literally nothing. It would take a very good story writer to come up with a list stories that really fit into the "INVEST" category of the story. I am not saying it is impossible, I just think that two Sprints of bad stories is not a bad price to pay to get the ball rolling as early as possible and avoid lots of hassle to learn and teach and debate about good stories vs bad stories.