Let the sprints begin!

We've had our first sprint planning session, and it's gone pretty well. Over the past few weeks we have come up with an initial product backlog, and I've estimated all the stories using story points. The only snag is there are over 200 stories! Still, we managed to pick out five to develop and test in the first sprint. We're starting off with two week sprints, and we'll see in the retrospectives how well that works out. I'll be trying various ways of presenting stuff on the project whiteboard, and I will post here how well each one works for us.

So, day one dawns. I've left the heady world of corporate software development, and begun the startup adventure!

In this blog I'll be writing about the whole process of getting a new site developed and launched. I'll be looking in some depth at all kinds of different tools to do what we need, and writing a fair bit about managing the software development process too. I'll be using Scrum to keep my business partner's creativity in check, and it will be interesting to see how well that works - my last corporate project was something of a Scrum disaster, but I think it can work much better in the startup environment. Time will tell!