DevTeach day 1

The first day was amazing. I think the highlight was Roy Osherove's Agile Q&A session. This was the most creative session, but required the least preparation! To make a clever point, Roy asked the audience bewhat we wanted to see in the presentation. So he gathered requirements from the clients. Then he asked us to prioritize them by voting on each requirement. In the alloted hour, we only managed to discuss the top 3 topics (of 16!), but between Roy, Scott Bellware, Jean-Paul Boodhoo and Wendy Friedlander, you can bet the topics were well covered.

The top 3 topics were:

1) estimation (40 votes, of about 60 people in the room)
2) distributed teams (35 votes)
3) adoption of agile in organizations (30 votes)

My question came in at #9 with only 15 votes, so "one team, multiple projects" is a common problem (25% of the folks in the room, using my newly minted estimation skills), but not common enough. Maybe one of these folks will be kind enough to comment here?

I have read Ken Schwaber's book, but if that point was covered, I missed it.

My thinking has been to ignore the projects and only worry about requirements. This means an interation could include tasks from each project, as long as someone can prioritize accross all the projects.

Also, if the team is responsible for developement and IT at the same time, time estimates must be allowed for the interruption driven IT work.

These things diminish the business value you can deliver for an individual project during each iteration.

In case you haven't figured it out, I'm talking about a very small team in a small office.