Things are a bit different in my current team. There is no Crucible reviews (but we will start a trial run in April), and we use the cards on a whiteboard method. I like it.

The reason that the cards method works here is that there isn’t a 1-1 mapping between the task cards and JIRA issues, like what you have in your team. This is sometimes frustrating for me, but I embrace the lack of process overhead.

The lack of meetings is critical to productivity for the team. Now that I’m no longer a team lead, I actually get a bunch of coding done – it’s refreshing. And I see that the whole team is pretty much at their keyboards every day.

We run 3-week sprints, but the feature-freeze is the end of the 2nd week. The final week is used for fixing bugs created in the new features, or, if none are found, for fixing bugs from the backlog.

There is one full day of planning and retrospective meetings every sprint (spread out over a two-day period).

One of the meetings that I most enjoy is the “Code Retrospective” meeting. This is strictly for developers. We have the opportunity to present code that we worked on, wrestled with, created, modified, etc. It’s been an incredibly useful meeting to share knowledge among the team.

In addition, we work strictly in the trunk. There are no ‘project’ branches. If a feature is of significant size, then it gets worked on in small chunks. So long as it is stable by the end of the sprint – not necessarily complete – just stable.

I agree with you about Atlassian. We have just upgraded to Jira 4, Confluence 3.1 and got FishEye full version. Will trial Crucible soon. Continuous integration is done with Hudson, but how long will that last once we have the rest of the Atlassian suite?