Introducing the Agile Planner Retrospectives

For the last six months I've been wanting to write up some of the experiences I've had while bootstrapping Agile Planner. I've also been dying to tell everybody about what I've been adding to the product itself (the screenshots in the tour are long overdue an update).

I'm also aware that there are a lot of people out there who are keen to give Agile Planner a go, and other than the odd (very) infrequent email there's not been much indication of what's going on recently.

Unfortunately I've always struggled to find the time to fit serious writing in alongside product development while there's so much more to do to make Agile Planner the tool that I want it to be.

I've started drafting lots of "big" blog posts that (due to the time it takes to edit and publish them) have never seen the light of day. It's clear that if I'm going to succeed in sharing my experiences and keeping people up to date on where Agile Planner's heading, I'm going to need a change of tack.

I'm going to focus all my writing effort on short fortnightly articles covering what's been happening in the previous iteration. These posts will cover both:

• An overview of the features I've been working on, and
• What I've learnt. This stuff will vary. One week it could be about the difficulties of bootstrapping, productivity or motivation. The next week it might all be about things I've learned about Agile techniques, or the Planner itself.

It'll be a medly, but it'll be the real story. A combination of a product update and an agile retrospective, if you like. I already make notes about how things went at the end of every iteration, so publishing these notes on the blog and throwing in a few screenshots will be easy enough.

Some of the most interesting stories (inevitably) date back to the early days of Agile Planner (32 iterations ago!), but I've been making notes since the beginning and I'll slowly be converting the more interesting ones into blog posts that will appear on the retrospectives page and in the RSS feed.

In time, these retrospectives should tell my bootstrapping story better than I could if I tried to distil it all into a few articles.

I'm going to kick these retrospectives off with a write up of iteration 32, which I finished yesterday.