provided by: 
Originally published at Internet.comReview Part One
The Planning Game
Stories were used in an informal version of the planning game. As the client had never written stories before, Cognitech had to lead the client through writing the first few stories. Once the client understood the purpose of the stories, it started to create them by itself. The client prioritized the stories, and the development team worked through stories in priority order. The full planning game was not played out by defining set stories per iteration. In fact, the iterations were really defined in each steering group meeting on a weekly basis. In these meetings, the last week's worth of stories implemented were reviewed and the stories to carry out in the following week were defined.
Bug killing is always a task less than relished by developers, but by identifying bugs when they are young, it somehow moves into the realm of getting the code working in the first place, which is of course nothing like bug fixing! In order to identify bugs as early as possible the team carried out early and continuous testing, they defined test plans on the first day of the project and built testing tools before and during development phases. This allowed the team to constantly confirm any assumptions made. The test plans and tools were also reviewed by the client to ensure that they were testing the right criteria. Bad tests are often worse than no tests, as they can provide a false sense of security...
Read article at Internet.com site