Increments and Timeboxes

Having divided the entire Prioritised Story List into three distinct Themes (or Increments in technical speak), we have just finished work on the first increment. Well, sort of. We have deployed the last of our stories into our test environment, but there are still some bugs outstanding, so we will be dedicating some time to fixing those over the next week or so before we put it live.

So we have now arrived at another Increment boundary and I have learned another lesson: Increment planning should be done in advance! Until yesterday, I was under the impression that we should ignore the second increment until we were finished with the first. But yesterday’s planning session was slow going. I also made the mistake of confusing it with a timebox kick-off, so I was expecting too much from the session.

It is therefore important to distinguish between an Increment Planning session (in which the candidate user stories are reviewed, clarified, understood, and prioritised), and a Timebox kick-off, in which the stories selected for development within the upcoming timebox are broken down into development tasks and estimated.

My next post will contain a few guidelines for conducting Increment Planning sessions.