Coaching/Iteration notes

Standard to-do list
You can copy-paste this (or subsections of it) into the section above if you want.

First day (Thursday of first week)

 * Email: "Welcome to Iteration #N"
 * DW post: similar

During planning phase (Thurs-Sat)

 * Actively recruit coders -- nag on mailing list, IRC, personal contacts, etc.
 * Tracker:
 * make sure a good set of stories are in the "Current" iteration -- consult with "customer"/mailing list/Skud/common sense on this
 * try to include at least one "easy" story

Start of coding period (first weekend through Monday of first coding week)

 * Email: starting coding
 * Make sure people have pairing sessions lined up
 * Help people choose stories to work on

First week of coding period

 * Check in with coders, see that they've started and are OK
 * Point them at resources if needed, eg. Development pre-requisites, tool/techniques listed under Pairing

Second week of coding period

 * Progress check with coders
 * Some stories should be finished by now
 * Encourage those who have finished a story to take on another
 * Is anyone stuck? Find them help or explain Passing


 * Recruit "customer" to sign off on stories
 * Email: "We need a gardener to review our work" (if you have one lined up, you can skip this)
 * DW post: ditto
 * show them what to do: Customer
 * As new stories are delivered, make sure customer knows to review them

End of coding/start of retrospective (Monday of last week)

 * Email: "pencils down"
 * If any stories are outstanding, negotiate with coders about either finishing quickly or passing on it til next iteration.
 * One option is to reduce the scope... if a story can't be completed, split it into two smaller ones, call the smaller one complete, and put the second/subsequent parts of the story in PT for a later iteration.
 * Make sure customer can review/signoff on stories by Wednesday

Last day of iteration (Wednesday)

 * Email: declare iteration closed, publicise velocity
 * DW post: wrap up iteration, say what was done

Email templates
Feel free to personalise these! They're just included to save you some time if you're in a hurry or haven't done this before. Be careful to replace any metasyntactic variables like $name with something meaningful.

Welcome to Iteration N
Welcome to Iteration $N! As you may know, we work in short three-week iterations, each one starting with a short planning period, followed by two weeks of coding, and then some time to wrap up and look back at what we've done. (You can read more about this at http://wiki.growstuff.org/index.php/Iteration .)

Your coaches for this iteration are $X ($email) and $Y ($email). We'll be trying to keep things moving along and we'll be your first point of contact if you have any trouble or need any help. Please get in touch with us any time.

Right now we're planning what we'll be working on for the next few weeks. You can see the stories that have been proposed in Pivotal Tracker, at http://tracker.growstuff.org/ -- the ones under "Current" are this iteration's stories, while the "Backlog" shows the ones we're hoping to work on in the next couple of iterations. If you have any thoughts on what stories should be included, their relative priorities, etc, please let us know. (For more info about Pivotal Tracker, including more accessible ways of using it, see http://wiki.growstuff.org/index.php/Pivotal_Tracker .)

We're also looking for developers. If you'd like to help with coding, please raise your hand. You don't need any prior experience -- everyone will be working in pairs, so if you're new to coding or to Rails or just a bit rusty, let us know and we'll pair you up with someone who can help you out. You can read more about pairing at http://wiki.growstuff.org/index.php/Pairing.

If you'd like to code on this iteration, please reply with:


 * what you'd like to work on (if you already know)
 * what your availability's like (including your timezone)

Coding will officially kick off on the weekend, and run for two weeks. This iteration will end on $date.

Coder recruitment - personal
Hi $name,

A while ago you said you were interested in working on Growstuff. Would you like to work on something this iteration? Our coding period starts on $date and runs until $date. We can try and pair you up with someone whose skills/experience complement yours and who's available in your timezones. You can see the stories we're planning to work on at http://tracker.growstuff.org/. Let us know if you're interested!

$yourname

Starting coding
Hey everyone,

It's the weekend, which means it's time to start coding on this iteration. Hopefully most of the people who said they were interested have been paired up. If not, let us know and we'll help you find someone who's a good match for skills and availability.

If you've got a partner, make sure you schedule a time to work together! It's best to do this ASAP or time can get away from you. The website http://timeanddate.com/ can be handy for figuring out timezones. Once you've got a time sorted out, make sure you know how you're pairing (we've listed some possible ways at http://wiki.growstuff.org/index.php/Pairing ) and installed any necessary chat or screensharing software (usually Skype).

If this is your first time coding with us, you'll want to make sure your development environment is set up. See http://wiki.growstuff.org/index.php/Development_pre-requisites for more information, but don't worry if you can't make sense of it or get stuck partway -- your partner should be able to assist you, or if not, the coaches are here to help.

To start working on a story, just go to http://tracker.growstuff.org/, pick a story from the current iteration (on the left), and click "Start". When you're done, click "Finish" and submit a pull request to the central Growstuff repo on github.

If you need a hand with anything, you can ask on the mailing list, on IRC, or contact one of the coaches: $X ($email) or $Y (email).

Coding will at the end of the weekend two weeks from now, on $date.

$yourname

Pencils down / retrospective kickoff
Hi all,

It's the end of the coding period/start of our retrospective, before moving on to our next iteration on Thursday.

It looks like our velocity for this iteration is 14 -- AWESOME!

Stories completed this iteration include:


 * list
 * list
 * list

You can see the details here: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/646869

Thanks to those who worked on stories this iteration: (list coders and anyone else who's contributed significantly, including anyone doing the "customer" role)

It's time for our retrospective now. As usual, the following questions are just prompts/starters, so feel free to raise anything else you think needs discussing.


 * what did you work on this iteration? how do you feel about the work you did?
 * what did you enjoy most? least?
 * do you think the process ran smoothly? what parts worked and what didn't?
 * could we improve our tools to make things better for you?
 * do you feel like we had the right level/type of communication among participants?
 * anything else we could improve?
 * any people you want to give a shout-out to for their work/support/participation?

If all those who were involved in this iteration could respond, that would be great!

Next iteration will kick off on Thursday.