The Disaster Exercise (How to use negative thinking to your advantage)

“I had such a nightmare last night, you would not believe it!” announced dramatically LittleMissLisa entering the office on a rainy Tuesday morning.

“Good morning to you too!” Annie answered with a smile.

“Yes, hi, I am sorry, but… it was so terrible, a real Armageddon!”

“Apparently you are fine! Did Bruce Willis come and saved you?”

“Obviously! And also, I got this neat idea! Let’s go and get some coffee. And then we will do a Disaster exercise!”

 

The Disaster Exercise

How many is too many?

The team has their first iteration ahead of them, and they will be working on several different tasks during the 4 weeks period. The tasks are picked out, the time estimates are done, the backlog is filled in, but now, since this is their first Sprint together, the team members have to start finding out answers to several questions they have before them.

LittleMissLisa believes that there are no absolute best answers, but that they have to come to what will work best for just them. The team may not discover it from their first attempt, but one has to start somewhere!

The Team is having a short brainstorming to solve the following:

Meaning – when describing a possible workflow for a task, how many and which statuses should they use for that?

What would you do…

… if someone messed with “your code”!?

Toby was on vacation for a week. He came back to work on Monday, somewhat earlier than others, still jet lagged. He was all ready to dive back happily into the piece of code he was working on just before vacation (the post-it note was still standing untouched on the wall, under ”In progress”).

Toby synchronized the code, looked for all the familiar class names… and got stunned! All of his nice framework blahblah handling classes were in a different package. No, in a two, wait, three different packages! WHAT!!!