Just a quick post to congratulate the team on a great sprint. It was our best to date. At blist, we use a development methodology called Scrum. It’s designed to be lightweight and agile. Within the framework of Scrum we run two-week sprints. That’s a short development cycle. On the starting Monday of each sprint we have a kickoff meeting where we review a prioritized product backlog of features and the engineering team assigns cost estimates for each feature. Then we draw a line where the total estimate equals the total available man power. Everything above the line is what we hope to accomplish in the sprint.

Early in the development of blist we’d be lucky to penetrate 50% into the backlog in any particular sprint. I think we finished this sprint with something like 93% of the work items being completed. Hoowah! Great work, team! Our burn down rate was linear through the entire sprint as well. The burn down rate shows on a daily basis how many hours of estimated work remain relative to how many man hours are left in the sprint. Here’s what a sample burndown chart looks like:

We’re still not revealing too much about what it means when we say we’re building the world’s easiest database, but a few features completed in this sprint include:

* Lenses
* Simple search
* Multi-sided columns
* Preferences

I’m excited for Monday’s sprint kickoff meeting to see what we’re going to bite off in the next two weeks.