Sounds more like a sprint than an iteration since iterations are 1 week.
As I mentioned already in the thread, retros are not just about the work... it is a check in on what went good, meh, bad during the week. It can be about anything, not just work. The idea is to have one hour at the end of a week closeout team bonding where anything can get laid out on the table.
Your iterations are 1 week. An iteration could be any length of time. And retros are exactly what you said. During our retros we have talked about iteration length multiple times and tried varying ones. In our retros everything is on the table for discussion, but it sounds like that's not the case at Pivotal.
'Your' is Pivotal. I'm just talking about how they do things and what I learned there.
At Pivotal, an iteration is a week and it doesn't make any sense to make it longer than that. What would a longer than 1 week iteration really be? Are you making them longer only because you don't want as many retros?
I said:
"The idea is to have one hour at the end of a week closeout team bonding where anything can get laid out on the table."
You said:
"In our retros everything is on the table for discussion, but it sounds like that's not the case at Pivotal."
There is a disconnect somewhere cause I'm pretty sure we are saying the same thing. =)
> At Pivotal, an iteration is a week and it doesn't make any sense to make it longer than that.
It might. For example, if your team is distributed (eg development in the Pivotal office, infrastructure in the client office), you might prefer to have retros once every two weeks, rather than either drag the infrastructure people across town every week or have retros remotely.
On some projects i anchored, we had planning meetings twice a week, because planning went more slowly, relative to development, than usual, due to complexity of features, multiple stakeholders, etc. We still had retros once a week. Was our iteration one week or half a week?
The truth is that iterations don't really exist. You have planning meetings at some frequency. You have retros at some frequency. You have client liaison meetings at some frequency. You may have various other meetings at various other frequencies. Sometimes the frequencies are the same, but it doesn't mean anything.
I came across as argumentative in my first response. I didn't mean to :)
> There is a disconnect somewhere cause I'm pretty sure we are saying the same thing.
Sort of. In our retros everything actually is up for discussion. If people think 1 week iterations may work better for us, we may try them out (and we have). We got rid of daily standups because of a retro discussion (they may come back if we feel communication is lacking). The point is there are no sacred cows.
You already stated a few things that appear set in stone. 1 week iterations, pair programming, daily stand ups, and everyone at the office for the same hours every day. From my standpoint that appears very rigid, and I wonder what there is to talk about in the retro if the development process is static.
Many Pivotal teams hewed closely to the default practices, but not all. The most dogmatic is Pivotal Labs, because its job is to teach the basics. Having a rigid, predictable structure works better to start folks off.
I've seen every sacred cow at Pivotal slaughtered by Pivots and guests, when it was felt that this was the right and effective thing to do.
As I mentioned already in the thread, retros are not just about the work... it is a check in on what went good, meh, bad during the week. It can be about anything, not just work. The idea is to have one hour at the end of a week closeout team bonding where anything can get laid out on the table.