Delivered first release on Tuesday, as promised. Just enough system to (1) verify that we'd gone 'end to end' and (2) to give the users a starting point to steer us from.

Wednesday we played the Planning Game for the first time. For several reasons it suited us to make the next iteration short: it ends Friday week! I encouraged everybodyto think short-term, not Final Solution.

We had 2 x 6 = 12 calendar days. Planning Extreme Programming suggests an initial estimate of 1:3 for ideal:calendar time. But Joe & I are a small team, so we may get 1:2. Our estimates for the user stories were 6 days, so we accepted all of them. Which then prompted a few "Oh, and another thing..." so I dealt out blank cards to everyone to make notes for next time.

So far, only Kevin, the most senior person on the business side, is writing stories. But everyone's contributing, and there's an exhilarating sense of partnership.

The biggest dampener of spirits is the uncertainty about whether we will get a mainframe programmer to help us build an interface. Fortunately we've got screenscraping as a tested fallback.

From one of the stories two trainers took on the task of identifying the 'minimum set' of data to be recorded, so that we can drive completely from a keyboard until we can get a mainframe interface. Today they reported that so many data are needed that there would be no operational advantage in doing it. It would take as long as the present methods, but be less familiar.

Fortunately, I've got time in hand from coding up the output documents -- pair programming with one of the trainers. So I will hand bake more test cases into the library and we will run THOSE through. So no production use before the mainframe link, but we can test.

Time I implemented the automated testing for the output documents. No -- I keep catching myself -- that's a story for the next planning session.

Nothing like a 'green fields' XP project: Friday Joe and I integrated my work with the SVQ system. We had hoped we might be done by lunchtime, installed by teatime.

Nah. We'd got close by midnight, when I called a halt. After 12 hours we had entered the 'negative productivity zone'. An hour in this zone costs more than an hour later fixing the mistakes we make. Joe slept over and we nailed it on Saturday morning.