The story starts like any other project, but it’s worth mentioning that the job was quite lengthy and challenging. We were taking over a project with a considerable legacy code in an analytical application that simply didn’t work at the time.
The discovery phase was a huge mission in itself, and then the first couple of sprints were mainly focused on building the right team structure for the project and establishing the process, testing, etc.
It was a massive assignment. And like it usually is with those kinds of jobs, we needed to approach it the right way to reduce any risks and ensure we’ll be as efficient as possible once we begin.
But other than that, it’s fair to say that the workflow wasn’t that much different from any other project we’ve done before. For the first few months, we would spend quite a lot of time planning, meeting, and consulting within the team and with the product owner from the client's side. After about 4 sprints, we’ve managed to reach fairly high efficiency, and our 7-person team was closing around 50 story points per sprint.
However, we would still spend a large portion of our time discussing the project and figuring out the best way to move forward together. And at some point, we realized that those meetings were far less productive than those we had a few months back.
At the time, they were necessary. We were still figuring out our ways around the project and making sure we all shared the same vision. But it became clear that we don’t need that anymore. Around sprint no. 25, we came to the conclusion that we agreed with each other a bit too often. So, if we’re all on the same page, maybe we don’t need to talk that often.
The final straw came from the product owner, who strongly favored creativity over procedures. He believed that our team had all the capabilities to make the right decisions without a lot of his involvement.
So we just decided to switch things up a bit.
