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| <mainDescription><p>
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| Personal contribution on an&nbsp;iterative project is organized in <strong>micro-increments</strong>. A micro-increment
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| represents the outcome of a few hours to a few days of work for one person (or typically a few people collaborating) to
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| reach the goals of the iteration. The concept of a micro-increment helps the individual team member to partition their
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| work into small units, each of which delivers something of measurable value to the team. Micro-increments provide an
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| extremely short feedback loop that drives adaptive decisions within each iteration.
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| </p>
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| <p>
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| A micro-increment should be well-defined, and you should be able to track daily progress of each micro-increment.
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| Micro-increments are specified and tracked by a work item. Change sets represent the physical outcome in terms of the
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| files that are modified as a part of completing the work item. Let's have a look at some sample micro-increments:
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| </p>
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| <ul>
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| <li>
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| <b>Identify stakeholders<em>.</em></b> Defining a shared vision is a task that can drag on for weeks, so to ensure
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| that you make and track daily progress, divide the task into small and well-defined micro-increments. Describing
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| and getting buy-in on which stakeholders to put into a Vision document is a meaningful result, and may take a few
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| hours or at most a few days, and thus represents a suitable micro-increment.
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| </li>
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| <li>
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| <b>Develop Solution Increment.</b> Defining, designing, implementing, and testing a use case or even a scenario can
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| take weeks or longer. To ensure continuous progress, divide the work into smaller increments, each of which can be
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| done in a couple of days. A more suitable micro-increment may be to only define, design, implement, and test a
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| subflow of a use-case or step within a scenario.
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| </li>
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| <li>
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| <b>Agree on Technical Approach for Persistency.</b> Agreeing on your technical solution may take quite some time,
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| so you need to narrow the task to something that can be defined and agreed to in a short time. One way to partition
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| the work is according to the issues that you need to resolve, such as persistency or reporting. This
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| micro-increment will probably involve defining requirements, surveying available assets, prototyping, and
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| documenting the decisions.
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| </li>
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| <li>
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| <b>Plan Iteration.</b> This micro-increment could include setting up a meeting for creating the iteration plan,
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| doing some preparation for the meeting (such as reviewing candidate work items), coaching the team through the
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| iteration planning meeting, and posting the iteration plan for easy access. The end result is something complete
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| and measurable, a posted plan that has buy-in from the team.
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| </li>
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| </ul>
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| <p>
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| Your project evolves in micro-increments through simultaneous execution of a number of work items. By openly sharing
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| progress on your micro-increments through daily team meetings and team collaboration tools, you achieve the
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| transparency and insight into each other's work required for effective teamwork. At the same time, you demonstrate
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| continuous progress by evolving your application one micro-increment at a time.
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| </p>
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| <p>
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| Typically,&nbsp;practices&nbsp;provide a set of activities to be performed. Each activity is captured as a set of
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| tasks, steps within tasks, and guidance. Even though micro-increments are not explicit constructs in the practices,
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| within the activities you will find descriptions of how to carry out a set of related micro-increments that are
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| commonly found in projects.&nbsp;This guidance does&nbsp;not provide a complete description of all potential
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| micro-increments:&nbsp;each organization should consider adding their own "recipes" for commonly occurring
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| micro-increments.
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| </p></mainDescription> |
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