I am monitoring a competition where each sprint is scheduled to one hour interval. Each team member should have a count down c'lock on the screen, preferrably on terminal. The c'locks should lauch alarm after 45 minutes, 55 minutes and and 60 minutes.
The enviroment should create a feeling of extreme programming. Is there some ready terminal application for the job?
[Clarification] The teams are using Ubuntus and Macs.
Okay, my first question is "good God, why?" How can you do a sprint in an hour.
But having said that -- I presume it some classroom session or something -- there are a number of applications like that; mentioning the operating system might help narrow it down.
On Macs I'm fond of using Miniteur.
On a UNIX system, it's an ur-simple shell script (bash syntax here):
sleep $((45*60)) && echo "Forty five minutes"
sleep $((10*60)) && echo "FIVE MINUTES LEFT"
sleep $((5*60)) && echo 'TIME IS UP!'
"...The enviroment should create a feeling of extreme programming...", I think this environment will create a feeling of extreme pressure, we're not flipping burgers here, we're doing something creative, give your team a break if they need to know what time it is, and how much of each hour is left they'll use their watches.
BTW has this approach been tried already? If so did it work? What did the team think of it?
There's one thing I really like while thinking about 1 hour sprints/iterations. If I think of the crazy pace of the sprint, the first thing that popped in my mind (to actually make anything done in this short timebox) is pair programming or even team development. The very essence of XP.
Which made me think. The shorter the sprints the more you start using XP paradigm. You start fast brainstorming within the team, pair program code (the fastest coder does it) and communicate a lot. Perfect XP.
Though in real life this short sprints are a killer to burn-out your team really quick. But you can learn a lot by thinking of it. And adopting results to natural sprint length (1 week).