Premium Services Development Update

I’m going to write a straight up development update entry this week, focusing on the development team’s work to get Premium Services launched.

We are smack dab in the middle of our final Premium Services sprint. We have been focusing almost exclusively on Premium Services functionality for the last few sprints. In Scrum terms, the previous sprints were classically organized and managed: we held the typical sprint planning meeting, we prepared a sprint backlog, we estimated our tasks, and we burned down the tasks daily.

The current sprint departs from these usual Scrum activities in a several ways. First, our planning meeting was very short and consisted almost entirely of prioritizing outstanding bugs lists and a few remaining functional items. We did not estimate the items on the bug lists. We also decided not to create a typical burn down chart for this sprint, which is 2 weeks in length. Our functional backlog for this sprint is a prioritized list of items in Mantis, the issue tracking system we use. We review it each day in our stand up meeting. Our goal for the sprint is to resolve all of the high and medium priority issues found during the sprint.

Here are a couple of measurements on how we are doing so far in the sprint. The Issues Remaining count is the number of issues that are outstanding for the launch. Some of these are medium and low priority, which may end up getting pushed to the next sprint. The source control revisions count is the number of developer check in operations on that day.

	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4	Day 5 (today)
Issues Remaining	69	66	55	56	59
Source Control Revisions	14	11	10	4	24

Our revision count yesterday was low because we spent time demonstrating the product and also because one of our developers was rewriting a major piece of code, which inhibited check in actions by other developers.

I’m very happy that the total issues remaining count didn’t skyrocket as a result of our demo yesterday.

OK, so the number of issues remaining is not regressing to zero very quickly (or at all). I am not freaking out because I believe most of the testing work has been completed already. All of the functionality has been reviewed and tested many times already. So, once we fix the current crop of bugs and issues, I think that number will quickly drop.

I continue to be optimistic that we can launch Premium Services in just over a week with a reasonable level of functionality and stability. Once again, I’m really proud of our development team and their work. They have worked really hard the past few weeks. Thanks everyone.

Thomas Klassen