Recently, on my last project we had to make some product choices (which web server, which application server, etc.). That's how I proceeded.

• I wrote down on an a spreadsheet all the key criteria for the product choices.
• I picked up three-four products for each product category.
• I've used only three levels of goodness of each product in each category: red = bad, yellow = ok, green = good. All the levels were relative to the other products choices and not absolute.
• We arranged a meeting, discussing the colours on the spreadsheet, at the meeting there was a representative of all the team roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner, some Team members, Architect)
• We cleaned up the spreadsheet and we send it to the client with more information on the suggested products.
• The process was time boxed, it took in total less than two ideal days and it was a task in the project backlog.

That's how the spreadsheet looked like:

I've started a month ago to draft a Mind Map about Time Boxing particularly related to Lean concepts with Staffan Nöteberg using Mind Meister, it has been fun, a sort of remote ping pong pair programming, pair thinking actually. Now I'm very busy and far from Europe (I'm a trainer in the current ThoughtWorks University batch in India) and it's getting more diffucult to follow this "project". I decided then to make this mind map public, putting the source online, any contribution, comment and question will be very much appreciated. [caption id="attachment_293" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Micro Time Boxing Mind Map"] [/caption] A full generated, browsable export page is here. If you're not familiar with micro time boxing, some links: The Staffan page about pomodoro in 5 minutes. The original Pomodoro paper by Francesco Cirillo My slides, from a ThoughtWorks awayday.

The title of the previous post "Some stuff you might try in your team" perhaps was catchy or maybe finally I wrote something interesting since I've got a big jump of visits, so I go on with a similar title, talking about retrospectives and let's see how it goes :-) There are two things that I'm doing right now when I run a retrospective: The short version of the prime directive, aka the Toni Directive and a bit of time boxing. The original version of the prime directive says:

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

It's too long! It takes ages to read it and in my opinion is less effective than a simple, concise, direct:

1. No blame thanks
2. We are all sure that every one did his best

That's it, I was bored when listening to the orginal, long version, I didn't see any blame running retros with this version neither people judging. You can try and let me know. What about time boxing? Well it cames after a (too) long retrospective run by me, The Kua came and told me, why not time boxing the next one? So right now we are trying to fit our weekly/2 weeks retrospectives in half an hour, of course for an end of project retro this might be not enough. But as a general recommendation, keep an eye on the clock, try to stop people when the conversation goes too long without adding any value, try to find an action quickly and effectively.

I had some downloads and some feedbacks, so why not spending another couple of "boxes" and write some more code?

• In this "release" there's a simple sound (next step will be to have something like a rooster/alarm clock, that would be great)
• There's a countdown with the minutes, seconds remaining for the current task (work or break)
• Screen is still fullsize, someone told me that he doesn't know what to do with it when it starts, perhaps I'll add in the future a customized menu with some graphic button at the bottom of the screen

The code, if you wanna have a look is on Google code here, the current MIDlet is here.

I wrote a small, very very simple MIDlet for time boxing since more than one person mentioned in last weeks that it would be nice to use such an application. It's a MIDP 2.0 app and it should work on any phone, on my N95 works fine. Depending on the number of downloads and feedbacks maybe I'll improve it. (UI is poor, no customization possible for instance...) MobileBoxing MIDlet