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We are following Agile development methodology. As a SCRUM master, I am maintaining the Sprint BackLog. I want to know what is the best practice to accommodate any increase in effort for a particular task in the middle of a project.
For example, I am doing ABC task and in the starting of the sprint I have estimated that it requires 10 hrs to complete it, but on the second day I realized that it requires 20 hrs, so how will i update the Sprint Backlog.
You change the remaining work to 20 hours. Scrum is concerned with the actual work remaining, not whether the original estimate was right. That's important, but it's not explicitly part of Scrum.
If this threatens your ability to deliver on your commitment, then you need to discuss solutions with your team and possibly also the product owner. Perhaps:
A teammate might have a simpler solution.
Other tasks were overestimated and you can still deliver everything.
The product owner might decide it's not worth the effort.
Sprint planning was rushed and the sprint should be declared a failure and restarted.
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I have a product backlog with some features and a sprint backlog which includes tasks for these features, and also such tasks which are not directly related with stories in product backlog (for example, testing, "to connect to db", "to do interface design" and so on). How can I calculate the velocity then?
You have two options:
Estimate them and treat them as planned work. Not ideal, since these "tasks" don't yield direct value ot the product backlog, but it sounds like work and the product backlog contains all the work that could be done to deliver the product...
Ignore them and treat them as overhead, your velocity will be lower, but that's ok, the velocity then tells you how much work you've been able to deliver that adds value. These other tasks are just "overhead". Or they'd be part of what's commonly called Refinement.
Of course the better solution would be to slice your work in such a way that these tasks are part of delivering the value for that sprint.
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I'm currently involved in a scrum project for a small organization.
Some events have led us to believe the organization doesn't understand their role in the scrum process. We've already gone as far as arguing about the size of the development team which, in my opinion, shouldn't be something for them to worry about (negative conclusion to this project has little to no impact on their end and large impact on us).
Learning the lingo as they go, they've asked us if they could see our backlog.
I don't have a ton of experience with scrum but is it wise to show it?
I fear we might get a lot of negative feedback because they don't understand the process all that well.
(Additional context: we are students and this situation is not covered by our classes, our teacher hasn't responded to our e-mails yet.)
Scrum is transparent. Everything the team does is open and visibile to all interested parties. Regular showcases are held to demonstrate completed work and both the sprint and project backlogs are public.
If you are following the Scrum framework then you will have a Product Owner who represents the business and is fully engaged with the team. It is the Product Owners responsibility to engage with stakeholders (i.e. other business users) to explain the contents of the product backlog.
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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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My team estimate tasks with hours, which is related to the TFS SCRUM Template nomenclature, however I've heard recently that tasks should be estimated in some abstration unit and using of hours is evil, what is the recommended way?
You can estimate in hours provided your team velocity is also based on hours since that's how you decide how many backlog items are likely to be delivered in a sprint.
But it's not necessary to use hours and it can sometimes give a false sense of exactness.
If you use an abstract unit for both estimating and velocity, you (or, more correctly, stakeholders and others who don't understand Agile) won't be confused into thinking that hours is an exact measure.
The confusion will stem from the fact that velocity is work-units-per-sprint and "hours-per-sprint" will be unchanging if your sprints are always a fixed size (say, four weeks for example, which will always be expected to be four weeks by forty hours by some number of workers).
However, your velocity is actually expected to change over time as the team becomes more adept, or experienced people get replaced with those with less experience, or half the team takes a month off on holidays.
That's why the whole concept of story points exists. They provide such an abstract measure so as to avoid this confusion. You simply estimate your backlog items in story points and keep a record of how many points the team delivers each sprint (the velocity).
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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).