Scrum Update

As we continue exploring Scrum at my workplace, we've started attracting observers, people from other teams who are interested in learning more about it and perhaps applying it to their own groups. Our team has some deviations from the standard Scrum implementation, which has prompted some questions. As food for future thought, it occurred to me that I ought to record those somewhere.

• No product owner. The product manager nominally responsible for this project is spread too thin, and has little or no involvement with the team. Most of the team is okay with this (it makes me nervous because it lessens accountability, which is one of the main goals of Scrum, I believe). We may be able to get away with it because the project is building a tool that will be largely used by internal people, at least in the early days.
• Two-week sprints. The suggested length is one month; we've been doing two-week sprints since the beginning. At first it was because the team lacked confidence in their estimations, and wanted more frequent checkpoints; now, I suspect everyone is just used to it. Again, it seems to be working fairly well, but I suspect this is project-specific. If we had bigger features to build, two week sprints might not provide the time to get anything done.
• Part-time resources. There's no dedicated QA or doc, and no expectation of ever getting any (I've got three other projects to mind, and QA is by far our most strapped department). I've just been taking whatever handful of project tasks I think I'll have time to work on during a given sprint, taking into account everything else that needs to get done. I feel I'm not really getting whatever benefits come from the methodology.
  
• No team space. No one has really commented on this. We do have a Wiki for virtual artifacts, but there's no physical team area.
  
• Seated scrums, and it's apparently impossible to keep developers from talking in detail about what they're doing. Since it's a small team, this hasn't been a problem most of the time, but as we add members the scrums are going to start getting unwieldy if people can't stick to the "what I did, what I'm doing, what's blocking me" formula.
  

Scrum Update

Agile methodologies aren't complicated things. They are, however, notoriously hard to do. We are only on our third scrum sprint and the issue of unit testing has raised its ugly head.

I get the impression that developers don't like writing unit tests. I imagine that they're not fun, that they feel like you're getting nothing done, making no progress toward those exciting deliverables, but one of the principles of agile development is that you have to do unit tests. It is the only way to make sure that you are delivering solid code at the end of these short development cycles. It's the sort of thing that gets done as you go, or it does not get done at all, because no one wants to take the time required to catch up when that time could be used to code another new feature--whether or not it works.

Here's a quick overview of agile concepts.

Mood: Cynical.

Scrum spreads

Looks like a second development project where I work is adopting Scrum. This will be interesting. The one I'm on is a small, internal project--we're working on something important (I think), but since it's internal it's low profile, and the team is very small; a good environment for experimenting. The new Scrum looks much bigger, and it's got real deliverables (that is, things that make money).

I really want to like agile methodologies, but I remain skeptical about the ability of most people to use them effectively. There's a mindset and a degree of self-discipline involved that I suspect will be hard to come by.

Scrum Project Update

My first week has not been very encouraging. I am supposed to be creating embedded assistance for two features during this sprint, but due to build problems, I have been unable to do anything towards this.

In a by-the-book scrum team all members are fully committed to one project. We don't have nearly enough writers for that where I work, but if we did, what on earth would I have spent the past week doing? I will try to remember to raise that at the sprint review. I may also have to ask if our definition of "done" somehow does not include "features are included in the nightly build."

Scrum, Scrum, Scrum

Not only is it fun to say*, it's a development methodology. We are giving it a try on one of our projects, and I am the writer on that project, so I hope I will have many thoughts on how it all works. To get started, some basics.

Excellent and Consistent Content Development through Agile and Scrum

Wikipedia on Scrum

* I suspect that a lot of the terminology in agile stuff was thought up late at night.