Determine Strategy for Moving Forward

At the end of an iteration an important issue is to identify how your team will proceed next iteration. You typically make this decision based on a successful demo and better yet clear feedback from actual usage of the solution in production. There are several sources of information to consider when making this decision:

• Input from your iteration demo. One of the primary reasons to run the demo is to get feedback from your stakeholders. Sometimes this feedback is specific to an aspect of your solution, and sometimes it is applicable to the success of your team. In the case of the latter you likely want to act on it sooner rather than later.

• The team. Your team itself should have a good sense as to how well the project is going. This is particularly true if they have been interacting closely with stakeholders or their representatives (such as the product owner).

• Usage statistics. Chapter 8, “Identifying the Initial Scope,” discussed how some operations groups require you to track statistics for your solution—the features people are using, what screens or reports they’re running, what help screens they are viewing, and so on—so that you have a better understanding of actual usage. If you’re doing this, and if you’re deploying your solution on a regular basis, these usage statistics can be a good indicator of what end users find valuable, what they find difficult to use, and what they appear to be uninterested in.