Iteration

As part of our Extreme Programming practice, we develop our code in short cycles called iterations. Currently, our iterations are three weeks long. They start/end on a Wednesday, and consist of the following phases:

Planning
Runs from Wednesday til the first weekend (about 3-4 days). During this time we:

- discuss forthcoming stories to work on - figure out relative priorities of stories - estimate the size of stories - break stories down into tasks - discuss who's interested in working on what

Coding
This runs for two weeks, from the first to last weekends of the iteration. This is the time we use to concentrate on actually implementing the stories for this iteration.

Release and review
By the last weekend of the iteration, all coding should be complete and integrated. Now is the time for us to review what we've done, how it went, and what we could do better next time. At this time, we also calculate the Velocity, which is how many points of work we achieved during the iteration. This feeds into the planning for the next iteration.