Category: Agile
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Scrum in a Nutshell
I found a nice, concise, description of SCRUM here: Scrum – a knol by Dan R Greening I found particularly interesting the first comment made that clarified my questions regarding the fundamental difference of the feature/story point estimation vs the task/hours estimation techniques. It appears that the reason is pretty much around the comfort of…
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Change…
As predicted an item was removed from the sprint backlog and then added a day later. I guess this is a symptom of bad planning and lack of vision by the Product Owner(s)? Or the fact that they don’t communicate between themselves? I’ve tried to explain to the BA (whose acting as a voice for…
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Everything still good…
Created the burndown chart today and the scrum wall using spare flipchart paper stuck up on a wall after looking at some ideas on http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com. Everything seems to be running semi smoothly so far, had to fight off some managers wanting to inject work. Also read some interesting stuff on prioritization from a blog post…
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The (Self Organizing) Team
The sprint planning sessions are taking long but this is because these concepts are new to the team. They need to be taught that they are the owners of their own destiny and as a team they, and only they, must move forward in this. The current way of working is way different, generally involving…
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First Sprint Planning…
Today was interesting… we did our first sprint planning meeting with a team of 5 people. After I’d sat with the designated Product Owner (a BA with a passion for the project) and created what I think is a sufficient product backlog, I explained the concepts of Scrum to the team (especially around estimation and…
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Prioritization
One of the key success factors of Scrum is a prioritized product backlog. Somehow I thought this might be easy, boy was I wrong. I’m trying to figure out why it is that I cannot get a single prioritized list of work out of business and I came up with these observations: People don’t want…
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First day back at work…
The first day back at work after the course was surprisingly interesting. Several people were extremely curious about the CSM course (this is good) and wanted to know more. I ended up explaining what we were doing wrong (to the best of my knowledge) and what I believed (or was told to believe?) was the…
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The CSM Course
The Certified ScrumMaster course in itself was extremely interesting and I’d recommend it to anyone who can get to it. It was also extremely difficult to find in South Africa but I finally stumbled on a course given by Boris Gloger (hosted by Peter Hundermark) and managed to get into it. If you’re thinking of…
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Certified ScrumMaster…
… ok now what? I guess that’s the biggest question I went away with from the CSM course I completed today. The course itself was extremely interesting and I think it served two purposes, the one was to reinforce my existing knowledge and the second to correct it, the latter being more prevelant. It was…