Day 4 of a Drupal Timebox
Yesterday was the first day that the Examiner.com development team was really coding. That became conversations in IRC and the beginning of features being sent to code and theme reviewers. The spreadsheet that we keep our user stories in is starting to move yellow stories to green and the salmon stories are being turned yellow (white is uncommitted stories, grey is deferred, yellow are committed to being developed, salmon need more information, and green are ready for manual QA). This is the time when the developers really get their heads down and are working hard to complete the stories they have allotted in the time period available and work on the bug backlog.

The morning began with our regular scrums - three teams, three scrums, three sets of projects. This post doesn't need to rehash our morning scrums.

The day was peppered with meetings including a review of current Infrastructure needs and ideation of new Ad targeting techniques with a Product manager. It included working through planning a business trip to work with another company on an Examiner project. We're also still working through retrospective improvements from the previous timebox.

The Backlog Mambo
We embrace the idea that the current work we're developing should be predictable. The current timebox development should be pretty much set in stone. There are times with opportunities or threats are so great that we need to suffer the challenges of context switching. This should be rare. Anything after current development should be negotiable. That is what a large chunk of today was all about.

Yesterday, the Product team brought to the Project Managers a prioritized backlog for the next timebox. This list was a first pass based on Executive Committee directives. The Executive Committee convened today with the Product Team, and representatives from Business Intelligence and Development. The top items in the list were discussed and adjusted. Scope was shifted and priorities were moved. There were requests to fatten out some additional initiatives. The next two weeks will have the Product team focused on developing user stories in conjunction with development and Creative working with themers on wireframes and comps.

The dance continues.