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My team is making the transition to Scrum.
I am facing an issue I still not found on the various Scrum resources I've been studying: how to manage training?
I express myself by example:
my team has 4 developers, 2 of them know nothing about Test Driven Development
the project must be done using TDD
Should I create a backlog item "Study TDD" and use the first sprints so that the untrained developers learn TDD?
Or should I remove the developers from the project until they completed the training? Which is the best practice in this case?
Just send them to the training, and continue your sprints as normal. While they are in training they won't contribute to the velocity, the same as if they were sick or on vacation or just having a bad day. The velocity isn't a goal so much it's an indicator.
You can create a story for training if you want, but it isn't necessary. If creating the story helps, by all means do it. Don't do it just because you think you're supposed to. I've been on teams that liked to track non-product tasks, and teams that didn't. Do what your team decides to do.
In your question you wrote:
the project must be done using TDD
I hope that's because the team decided that, and it wasn't something that was decided for them. The whole point of scrum is to build a team that can make these decisions for themselves.
Well, I will answer YES.
you need to create back log
you need to define test cases and follow TDD
you need to do stand-up meetings and daily follow up
you need to define a team member as scrum master who have best understanding
further, you can engage an online training of transformation expert
Like, I know these guys regarding Agile/Scrum Transformation. http://sparklegenius.com/solutions/agile-transformation/
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Recently, I am working on my course project, the topic is the creation of a new hybrid software process model by integrating Scrum and Team Software Process (TSP). Integration of these two models will be based on the SEMAT Essence Kernel Framework.
I am wondering:
Which steps should be followed for this integration (like
determination of the roles and artifacts in these two models)?
What should be the criteria to decide on good sides?
Thanks in advance!
The best way I think I can answer this question is by quoting the agile manifesto.
"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools"
Agile is about people, teamwork and craftsmanship. It's about involving the customer closely to figure out what really is needed - and delivering that, in small increments of working software. Agile is inspect and adapt, based on experimental delivery and the feedback and evidence that comes from that.
Trust yourself. Work closely together and you can do this. The best learning often comes from doing. :)
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We develop products and want to use SCRUM for development. We start with business case, high-level business analysis and technical outline that all contribute to and form the backlog items.
So after a month or so, we have the high-level features captured in the product backlog, keeping in mind it might change. So now we should decide on the team...how should I do that? How to tell whether 2 or 6 are needed, what is the best practice?
Usually SCRUM goes like this:
Depending upon the backlog and complexity of tasks a development team of 4-8 individuals is created which typically includes designer, architect, developer, tester and a scrum master (tasks like: analysis, design, development, review, testing & technical documentation).
You can decide on sprint cycle's length including a separate planning period
In planning period you assign tasks to individuals and the effort estimates based on availability of resources and time
After planning, you track the progress of tasks and update your backlog list accordingly
As SCRUM is supposed to be self organized, there are times when you might need some interaction from project managers or domain experts.
After each sprint cycle, ideally there should be some dedicated time for sprint analysis which can give inputs to next planning phase.
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Which organisations are best suited for use of Scrum methodology and why?
Scrum is not a development methodology, it is a project management methodology. Scrum is about managing workload and resources, and removing impediments to progress, and surfacing results at regular intervals to the whole team (including stakeholders).
Think to yourself:
could your dev/project teams benefit from a daily or bi-daily catchup meeting?
when you have design or project meetings, do the wrong people hog all the attention?
do you need to draw a distinction between various stake holders in a project?
could your team benefit from an iterative process, where "releases" are done frequently (i.e. every 3 or 4 weeks), and bugs and features are carefully prioritised against each other by the product manager?
The smallest team we have that uses something scrum-alike consists of 3 devellopers (2 full, 1 part-time), the stakeholder and the scrum-master ('secretary'). It works very well and we are planning to switch other small project teams to this method soon.
There are some 'points' you have to keep in mind:
We have the project status in an excel table under revision control, that is updated at least after the very short daily meeting.
The review and planning meeting is scheduled biweekly on a given day and will not be moved until all participants agree.
In all metings we break down the tasks from backloglist to smaller ones of max. 2 days of work, depending on the task type (concept, prototype, product etc). This proved to be the most valuable means to get reliable estimations!
If the stakeholder needs an status update or needs to adjust priorisation he can have a look at the excel table and change it, so even if he's not participating the planning meeting he has enough impact on project devellopment
The most important influence on management style is that you have evidence on what a given change would cost and what you can achieve until a given date (thing of a release date or a fair trade).
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What approach did you take to describe the benefits of SCRUM to clients / business units who do not have a technical background? Please list any analogies you thought were useful. Finally, how did you address the concerns that the Waterfall camp had?
I basically go around about risk reduction and ROI, since these are the main things people at the higher management level care about.
Using a incremental process significantly reduces the risk of wasting money on something that's not gonna be useful, because the customer helps steer the product development in the right direction through series of planned feedback cycles. The #1 reason for project failure according to the CHAOS research is lack of customer involvement. So why not use a process that eliminates that risk?
Also, with a incremental process you start delivering something in a much shorter time than when using a waterfall approach, which effectively increases the ROI (return on investment), since the customer starts benefiting from the product after one or two months, instead of waiting 6 to 12 months in a typical waterfall project.
You can also mention improved customer satisfaction, team self-improvement and self-management, which reduces the administrative overhead, improved employee satisfaction.
An additional point is protection of investment - with traditional approaches, a system typically "ages" with time, its value decreases, and maintenance costs rise until it's no longer feasable to maintain it. With an Agile approach applied well, the code should be maintainable and extensible indefinitely.
Here is a good, short video on all three points: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWvSnYjqOTQ
I would mention the benefits of focus. Because the guiding principle of sprints is functional focus and shipability, all details (e.g. ergonomics) need to be taken care of, whose fixing would otherwise be postponed under pressure in more global approaches. You don't have it all but what you have is solid. Non technical people appreciate that because it reduces risk from their point of view: it injects honesty and trust, together with interactivity, in the dialog with clients.
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EDIT TO IMPROVE CLARITY
Scrum suggests that you split your development into a number of sprints. Each sprint being a fixed duration. At the end of each sprint you ask the client if you should release the software. If they say yes, you perform a Release Sprint, during which you do all the tasks that you woud like to do contineously, but are too expensive, such as external user testing, performance load testing and sign off, burning CDs (if relevent), writing user centered documentation and so on
In my current project we have just performend our first release sprint. We found we lost a lot of the advantages of scrum such as the burndown (as a lot of things were fixing minor tweaks or temporaraly removing security from the site so the load testing could happen), a clear goal as to how much work was to be done next etc. Basically the relase tasks were too close to firefighting to be easaly trackable via normal scrum tools.
What methods have other people used for during a release sprint, and what pitfalls did you find that should be avoided?
Actually, I prefer this tool. It does task-tracking, burndowns, burn-ups, and is useful for project notes.
But to answer the question, tracking hours-remaining on a burndown should still work. It'll still tell you whether you're going to get all your release-sprint tasks (bugs/tweaks) done in time for launch. If the answer is "not all of them", then it's time to get the product owner in to do some prioritisation, and kick some of the tasks out of the sprint.
We're using a kanban board with scrum. Each product item is represented by a post-it note on the whiteboard. Its really obvious during the daily standups where everyone is with each of their tasks, and we can see how many tickets we have queued up in the 'pending' area on the board compared to the 'done' area at the other end.
Your goal should be to get to a point where you don't need a release sprint to deploy to production:) But with that said, what are you doing in your release sprint? There are still tasks to be done, but they are even more predictable than developing code. I've never seen a difference in how the burndown/planning works other than it usually involves adding people to the team from ops. That of course can be its own problem. Maybe you could give a quick idea of what a release sprint looks like in your organization.