9. Daily stand-ups
Another great XP practice we follow are daily stand-ups. This is a whole-team meeting without chairs; standing keeps the meeting short. Every team member (or a pair) communicates to the rest of the team, what work was done on the previous day and what still has to be done. This gives everyone an overview of current work status of a whole team. During the stand-ups we also plan work for a given day and assign pairs to user stories. Stand-up meetings are also a good time to share the information about problems experienced and ask for help. Since we work in the open workspace, we use its advantage and we try to raise and solve problems as soon as they arise, without waiting for the stand-up meeting.
In addition to individual team stand-ups we also have a daily company stand-up. The purpose of this meeting is to share what's happening is all different projects, with everyone in the company. This is a time where we inform people from other teams if we found some problems, we discovered a new cool tool or we found a good solution to some problem we have been struggling with. Possibly someone else has a similar problem or someone knows how to help us.
10. Big visible charts
Story boards are a good way of making information about the current progress of the project clearly visible. They are available not only to all team members but also a product owner. By looking at the story board one can immediately see what user stories were completed, what stories are currently in development and what stories are still waiting in a backlog to be started. We use either XP story boards or Kanban boards for this.
We also often use burn-down or burn-up charts, updated once or couple of times a day. These charts represent on axis amount of work to be done and time left do to this work. They give an immediate view of a current iteration progress or a release progress and team velocity. If anyone from the project needs this information it’s available all the time.
Actions taken from iteration retrospectives also go on the wall. They remind us every day what we decided to do to improve our work in the future.
It's very important that all these charts are clearly visible to all team members at all times.