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In a scrum team, how important is it to complete a single story before moving on?
Our scrum master is fairly dogmatic about bringing a single story to completion before moving on. I can see that development would appear to be more "controlled" in this scenario, plus the scrum master would have a very accurate picture of what team members were working on at any given time... but I am interested in what this really buys us?
Clearly the scrum master wants to minimise divergence of the burndown from reality to avoid a shock come the end of the sprint - but surely if the sprint is two weeks long, the burndown is updated consistently and blockers are communicated at standups - any such divergence will be constrained by the sprint length, and be made visible mid-sprint through the usual channels (i.e. the standup or speaking to the scrum master individually). Any remaining issues can be dealt with in the fortnightly retrospective.
The reason for the question is that I seem to find I work most efficiently by keeping say 2 (or 3 if one is particularly easy) stories in progress at any given time which I work on as I see fit. This seems to assist with the sub-conscious background thought that assists with completion of the task. It also permits me to better understand the bigger picture if a couple of stories are related.
Our stories usually work out to be one or two days worth of work.
So, is working on a couple stories at a time frowned upon and if so what does one-story-at-a-time buy you?
i think it really is up to the team to decide. i think you hit it in your write up about the burndown, the most important thing is to meet your sprint commitments consistently. how that happens really should be up to the team if they truly are self-governing. the team im on now, our norm is to work on multiple stories at once; its the nature of our setup given that we try to really spread ownership of stories across the team. it may be a different norm for yours if you have shorter stories and more of a individual ownership style.
I personally think one story at a time works well because it keeps you focused on a task. The cost of context switching between multiple stories can be high. This is a personal preference for me, but different people work differently. Though I think your scrum master is correct in his methodology, if you've found very compelling reasons for multiple stories at a time and can demonstrate that it is in fact helping progress, that would be a good case to make.
IMO, there is an underlying question here. Sometimes when working on a story, I'll need something from another department/team,e.g. clarification on a requirement or a graphic for a page, and this means that I won't finish one story before moving on to another story. While you do mention this in discussing the blockers at standup, this can happen where it is up to someone outside to help me finish a story so there can be multiple ones on my plate. Thus, I can have multiple stories due to blocking on something and still wanting to be productive.
In general, I don't like trying to manage multiple copies of the code base or switch my code a lot, so I prefer doing one story at a time, assuming no blockers. The size of the code base I'm working with is ~1.1 GB of data spread over 82,000+ files so having multiple copies could be more than a little painful I'd imagine.
My personal guess on this is that it is up to the team to set the standard and see that it works for them. If some like one story at a time and others do multiple and all is well, cool. If everyone likes having multiple stories at various points of completion, that can work too.
Don't hog the backlog...
In my experience, when stories are between 1 and 2 days in size, they tend to be implemented by a single developer. If you are working 2 or 3 stories concurrently, that might reduce the amount of things in the backlog that other developers can pick from and jeopardize the sprint.
... but plan for blockage
On the other hand, working 2 or 3 stories at once means that if you are momentarily blocked on one story you can be immediately productive on the other. I find that there's some overhead each time I start a new story. This overhead makes it hard to fill an hour long "gap" in my day with a new story, whereas it's much easier to context switch to a story I've already started.
Bottom line, let the team decide... and then review results during a retrospective. If your stories, tasks and work process support an environment where team members can work 2 (maybe 3) stories at a time without sacrificing productivity or predictability, then your SM should respect that. But at the same time you should honestly review the results during each retrospective and be prepared to change if the SM doesn't think its working.
I generally would think that the decision on how to work best should be made almost exclusively by the team. The ScrumMaster's role is to help and support the team, not to question the team's way of working during a sprint.
To be fair, sometimes it can be a good idea for the ScrumMaster to point out possible flaws or risks - that would fall in the category "help and support". Being dogmatic about your personal idea about how a sprint should look like internally is not something I would want a ScrumMaster to act like. It sounds a bit like misunderstading the role as a manager's role, which is simply not the case.
As for how we do it: We almost always work on several stories at once. At the moment we're having a four-person scrum team with three developers and one tester and we nearly always have at least two or three stories going at the same time. In the last sprint we tried to start with all stories early in the sprint to get to the point where we have a basic design and a good idea about what the potential problems could be. Of course we were not working on all stories at the same time after that.
I understand that in terms of risk-management you might want to make sure that everything is done for one story before you tackle the next. However, the disadvantage is that when you run into unforeseen problems lateron, you might not have enough time to fix those. Usually problems show their ugly faces during the implementation phase and often enough quite early. So, you basically exchange one risk for another.
Which risk is easier to handle shoud be up to the team. It's their sprint after all and while I think it's perfectly fair for the ScrumMaster to mention concerns about the way the sprint is going, he shouldn't force his idea of the best way to work on the team.
In the end, I think it boils down to these two things:
YES, we do work on several stories
at once and it has worked out fine
so far.
Remember that the ScrumMaster is
working for the team, not the other
way round.
Please note that I'm mostly talking about the whole team working on several stories at once, not one developer. The problem I'd see there is that you need to make sure that you don't block any stories by keeping them open, so that no-one else can continue the work. Once again, this is a question of circumstance and preference. When it comes to testing, our tester often has a couple of testing tasks for different stories, so that he can easily switch to a different task, if some bug blocks him from continuing testing a feature.
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How can you stop the dev team from padding their numbers when it comes to creating task times? How is there any motivation for them to do their work if there are no real deadlines and they are just measured against their velocity.
Get the job done by this deadline
vs
Get the job done whenever we will reduce scope, quality or increase resources
The foundation of most agile methods is trust. If you don't trust your team, why have you hired them in the first place? If you think they are not up to the task, it is better not to start the project because it is almost surely doomed to failure - either because you are right and the team is a bunch of inept developer,s or because you are wrong but your lack of trust and overcontrolling suffocates the team and actually saps their commitment and enthusiasm.
OTOH if you are sure that you have hired the best guys available, and that they are talented and motivated, the best is to give them a good challenge, let them work and try to remove all obstacles from their way.
In my experience most developers start out enthusiastic and motivated to create products they can be proud of. However, impossible deadlines, irrealistic expectations, too much bureaucracy, overcontrolling management - and last but not least, reducing quality - can quickly kill that motivation.
The point of agile methods is that developers are the right people to know / estimate the cost of a specific feature. If management insists on estimating both the resources, scope and time allotted to the project, it almost always results in disaster. If OTOH the developers are given trust and responsibility, they will usually live up to the task. In Scrum, the team together works out the estimates and fights problems / issues coming up during the sprint. In a good projects, team members quickly gel with the team and they feel personal responsibility for the project. This can go as far as poking laggard members to produce results instead of pulling the team back.
In my experience, developers pad numbers due to uncertainty. Are your product owners clear in their business requirements? Are the stories sufficiently small to estimate against?
Your 2 choices indicate to me that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of Scrum. The promise of Scrum is not getting the same result, just faster. It is the ability to iterate quickly, respond to feedback and alter course. The foundation of Scrum is the self running team. If you don't have teams you trust, Scrum probably isn't for your organization.
As Péter said in his response, team motivation is key and the quickest way to kill that is to undermine them. If the team feels management doesn't support or believe in them they will have no reason to make aggressive estimates and will simply cover their own butts. It's your job as a manager to help them succeed.
Additionally, the agile methodologies promote responsibilities to the peer. You shouldn't have just one person estimating items. Make it a group thing, and make sure (mostly) everyone agrees to the estimate. If you have your whole team colluding against you to pad estimates, you have a lot more problems than you think.
Besides, there's a lot of opportunity to pad estimates and make excuses in traditional waterfall / BDUF (big design up front) effort. I would say that scrum, with the daily scrum meetings, helps to contain this more than it helps to promote it.
I wrote a blog post a while back on estimation anti-patterns. It's a funny read but sadly all of the patterns are things I've either seen done or heard of from colleagues. We've gone through about 3 of them on our current project; I don't think there's any team which manages to avoid all of them entirely!
http://lizkeogh.com/2009/11/30/estimation-anti-patterns/
Also have a look into systems thinking, game theory and perverse incentives. If the devs are padding the estimates it's because the environment they're working in is encouraging them to do so. Changing that environment will help them.
Good answers on this one already. Basically, if you assume developers will cheat on you by reporting hours they didn't in fact work (but spent playing whichever MMORPG is now en vogue) why you even work with them in the first place? And if you trust them, why you think they "pad"?
BTW - it is completely normal for teams that are new to Scrum to first overestimate (and have to drop items from Sprint), then - getting thus burned - underestimate to avoid that happening to them again, then as others have pointed out team velocity will level out and people will have a better understanding of how much they can do within a sprint.
One more hint as to what you can do: don't question their hours, don't try to "manage" them by telling them how much time this or that should take. Rather, ask them how they want to achieve this or that, what solutions they want to use and why? It is quite common with good geeks that they tend to over engineer - if things look way bigger than you expected probably there is a misunderstanding here about what is being built that needs to be cleared.
It is actually quite impossible to "pad" estimates in scrum. After a few sprints the velocity will average out and the team will "know" how many points it can commit to. There is nothing to pad.
I think you have your statements backwards because
Get the job done whenever we will reduce scope, quality or increase resources
is an exact description of Waterfall; not scrum. In scrum we have deadlines, it is called the end of the sprint. In scrum we NEVER sacrifice quality because we know that will cost us more in the long run. In scrum we don't add resources because we know that people gel and form a "team" and upsetting that balance is detrimental to productivity.
Why are you bothering at all with task times? The only time I have seen good developers pad estimates is if they are forced into giving an estimate for an unknown feature. We don't do this in scrum. We know what the conditions of acceptance of a feature is before we commit to it.
One approach to avoid this situation entirely is to estimate in story points, i.e. ask the question "does this story require more or less work compared to that story?".
In my experience developers rarely pad their estimates. The general tendency of developers is actually to underestimate complexity and effort.
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I am the scrum master for a small team of 4 developers. The project we are working on has a lot of tasks that we have never done before and cannot easily estimate in a sprint planning meeting. What is the best way for me to run a sprint with this uncertainty? I am finding it very hard to finish a sprint with a potentially releasable product. I am also finding it hard to plan sprints when there is a lot of unknown length tasks.
I'm not sure what the term is in Scrum, but in User Story terminology you would do a "spike", which is basically a very short period of research into the topic so that your team will be able to estimate the task at the end of the spike.
Example:
Story:
Analyst wants to be able to review
financial data in pie charts.
Your team doesn't use any charting tools, so you need to know how long it would take to build something like this. Or perhaps instead, you could invest in third party tooling and integrate a tooling set with your application.
You would do a spike to research these venues and come up with estimations on them, then decide which route to take.
Are the "tasks" things that someone in the world has done before, or are they just new to your team. I will assume the later. If this is the case then what you are finding is that you do not have the necessary experience on your team to solve the problem. Thus you will be developing that experience as you go. All this means is that the complexity of your stories is higher. In the first couple of sprints you may score some of the stories as 13 and then later on they become 8s because you then have the knowledge you need.
You don't need to know how to do the stories to estimate them. You just need to take on less of them due to your experience gap.
I like to reserve "Spikes" (yes that is the term used in scrum) for attempting to solve business domain problems that have no known solution. Not for the team to do training.
If you really need to do research to get a good estimate, you could do the research as a task in itself, or set it aside and have it done (by someone) before the sprint planning.
Generally, I think that if you can't get a good estimate, you should either go with a bad estimate (i.e. a wild guess) or you should time-box the task, so you set aside a fixed amount of time for it in a sprint. After that, you will either have a done solution, or you will have a better understaning of it so you can estimate it or break it down into subtasks for the next sprint (or a later sprint).
Do you really mean tasks or are you talking about Product Backlog Items (PBIs)? Actually, I find it hard to believe that a task is not estimable. If they really aren't, they are very likely too big (tasks shouldn't exceed 16h, which is already huge).
If you are talking about PBIs, the situation you are describing is quite surprising and should theoretically not happen. In the worst case, just assign them a high number of story points, this precisely means that there is a lot of uncertainty on them. But, because PBIs that are ready for a Sprint shouldn't exceed the half of your velocity (or you'll put too much risk on your sprint), the obvious way to solve this situation is to divide such items into smaller chunks which may include exploration. But the important part is to keep things timeboxed, even (or especially) R&D. Keep in mind that with Scrum, everything is timeboxed.
In other words, to reduce uncertainty, break things down into smaller things (be them items or tasks)!
If the tasks seem un-estimable, I think the best approach would be to break down those tasks into smaller tasks that you can estimate. It might take several iterations, but you will probably come up with a pseudo design while you are at it. Joel mentions this in one of his articles.
Split the unestimatable task into a task to remove the uncertainty, and "the rest". Remove uncertainty with Proof-of-concept tests or spike solutions. Either schedules the spikes this sprint and the rest of the work next sprint, Or delay the start of the sprint for a week of spiking.
We often don't know enough to break a story down into tasks. We have a period of discovery before we know what the tasks will be. "Spikes" seem tricky to manage. For one, you may not be able to time box the discovery period. Second, I can't effectively plan a sprint without knowing how long a story will take.
Seems like another option is to do the spike in Sprint 1 and the tasks in Sprint 2. The downside is that it seems like the process forces an unnatural breakdown of the work. Why discover this week and then wait a while before starting the the work.
We use "contingents" or a specific backlog for such tasks.
The Scrum Tool Agilo is supporting this way of working and calculates those issues too, e.g. in the Burndown. In this way you get a good control on the "un-plannable" items.
Are you confusing precision with accuracy?
The idea behind Agile estimation is to come up with a number that is good enough, not a number that is exact. That is why using story points for backlog item estimation is a best practice; it emphasizes effort/complexity instead of duration.
You don't need to know how long each task necessary to implement a backlog item in a sprint will take. What you need to know is, given the work you've previously committed to in this sprint, can you commit to this backlog item? Because we know that we can't know exactly how much time each backlog item will take, we have to make an educated guess.
More important, what does it mean to fail in Scrum? Is not getting every sprint backlog item completed a failure? No... if you got four out of five items done and the fifth one is mostly done, you'll get credit for the four completed items (in terms of velocity for the sprint), and when you finish the remaining tasks for that fifth item in a future sprint you will get full credit for that item. But, would you have gotten any more done if you weren't using Scrum? The only failure in Scrum is failing to learn from your mistakes, to keep doing the same dysfunctional things repeatedly while expecting different results.
So, in your sprint planning meeting, don't spend a lot of time worrying about something you're not going to be able to know. Let the team think about the work, and then let them sign up for the amount of work they feel comfortable they can complete during the sprint. If they undercommit you can always drag something into the backlog, or end the sprint early. If they overcommit, then you finish the backlog items you can in priority order and discuss why the unfinished items couldn't be finished in the sprint retrospective, along with how to prevent having unfinished items in future sprints.
By the way, I know this was probably a poor choice of words on your part, but an effective Scrum Master doesn't run the sprint. The team runs the sprint, and the Scrum Master actively looks for impediments that lower their productivity and interfere with their ability to meet their commitments. Scrum Masters aren't managers, they're a combination of referee, coach, and scorekeeper. They are the Keeper of the Process, they help the team follow the process, they protect the team from outside agents that try to go around the process, and they track progress during the sprint via ensuring the sprint backlog is updated and the sprint burndown chart reflects reality, on a daily basis. In the situation you've described, where the team isn't sure how much work they should sign up for, the Scrum Master should let the team decide as a reflection of respect for team ownership of the commitment. Whatever the decision is, it won't be wrong.
Spikes should be time boxed. It puts on pressure on the team to limit the scope and have a better idea on the cost-benefits that the research will entail; ie it is useless to carry out 3 days of research for a task which would cost a few bucks.
This is also backed up by Latham's work on Goal Setting Theory where he specifically tackles this issue.
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I work with scrum about 2 months and don’t have all the experience I wish, so I would like to hear some inputs about it.
My concern is people never say about drawbacks for the two sides; company and workers.
I know the benefits of a cross-functional team but which are the drawbacks? What is hidden beside the amazing Eden Garden?
I'm confused because as a company benefits of replaceable people, for the team is good because the opportunity of having knowledge and share experience (besides all teamwork benefit).
Again, I know all the benefits but I want explore the drawbacks just because in the middle there are the ordinary people.
Normally these people dedicate heavily to gain knowledge. They buy books, courses, attending seminar and so on.
In every company when someone knows much more than everyone else, people and managers get desperate wishing or even demanding that these ordinary people share all their knowledge.
And that’s strange.. Because these are communism thoughts and we live in capitalism society and since I was born, everything was so competed and now people say about collaborative.
Can Scrum and Lean principles ruins (or making hard) the professionals' life?
Scrum and Lean, in and of themselves, cannot ruin anybody's life. Nor can they, alone, make your life.
The culture of your organization will always be a far more dominant factor than the particular product management or development management method in place. Scrum can be misused. Lean can indeed make workers feel replaceable and pressured to perform all day, all the time.
On the other hand, both tools (they are just tools) can be used to create high-performing teams where all members value each other and each others' contributions. Being on a team that delivers consistently good results at high velocity feels great.
You will also find every result in between. It depends much more on culture than process.
I believe that culture flows from the top. Therefore, look at how the company leaders treat each other, their subordinates, their vendors, and their customers. That will tell you much more about what your life will be like than which methodology the company follows.
I'm only going to address your comments about sharing knowledge reducing your own value. In an ideal team culture, knowledge itself isn't as valued as someone's ability to acquire new knowledge and solve problems they haven't seen before. When I think about the star engineers I have known, it's not because they know this or that, it's because it's obvious they could be on nearly any task, on nearly any team and they would both begin to solve the problem and raise the level of the entire team.
There are a few things I've seen from agile methodologies which I'd put against it when you're weighing it up.
From a developers perspective there are two things:
1) The short sprints often lead to short term decisions - which is as intended but can be frustrating for some developers. While delivering "just enough" is great for the project, asking a developer to do something that they know that they're going to have to very heavily refactor, if not rewrite, two sprints down the line can be demotivating.
2) Where you've got opinionated developers (and is there any other sort) I've seen conflict over prioritisation. Adding not only what should be done but how important it is and therefore when it should be done brings on a whole other level of disagreement. In theory the developers don't have a say here but hard delination never works.
From a management point of view they don't like the uncertainty. "When's it going to be ready?" "No idea, when we get to the point you say you're happy". Essentially for them it's a leap of faith - if they do it once then generally they're sold but getting them to do the first time is hard.
I will assume, that as one commentator suggested, you meant to ask: "What are the drawbacks of Scrum?"
I think that the biggest problem with Scrum is that it is easy to understand - but very difficult to implement properly. Scrum, like XP, like most methodologies is not built on individual atomic practices, each capable of improving an existing process.
Scrum requires a shift in the organizational mindset. It requires a shift from ego-centric to communal behavior. The entire organization should focus on bringing the most value, constantly, and do so over perceived self-interest.
For example, a cross-functional team member may be required to do things out of his comfort zone (the flip-side of being able to experiment with new interesting tasks), because it needs to be done by somebody.
Team Leaders and project managers need to relinquish authority when they are called to take on the role of servant-leaders, and when they are asked to stop telling team-members which tasks to pick, instead relying on the team to manage itself.
Stakeholders are forced to face the reality that they can't eat the cake, and have it whole, when they are forced to choose between having all of the scope they want or having it by the date they want it done (this is always true, but Scrum is really in-your-face about it).
Most of all, the drawback of Scrum, is its tendency to disillusion beginning practitioners. This comes from people expecting something from it that it can't deliver: A solution to their problems!
That's right! Scrum does not solve an organizations problems. It highlights them. It is up to the organization to step up to the bat and do something about them. Incidentally, this is done with what I consider to be the single most important ceremony of Scrum - The Retrospective! If you do nothing else in Scrum - do the retrospective:
Find out what you did well, and continue doing it.
Find out what you need to improve and do something to improve it.
Rinse and repeat!
In a presentation by Ken Schwaber to Google on Scrum, he once said that Scrum isn't necessarily good for the organization. It could tell you early on that your project is doomed to fail. If you avoid Scrum, you may have a few more months of ignorant bliss to prepare you for the day you lose your job. Funny, but true. Think on that.
Hope it helps,
Assaf.
I'm no expert in any particular methodology (Agile, Scrum, etc.) but I empathize with your feelings. One of the biggest issues I've seen is that a team that really isn't interested almost unanimously in the methodology will tend to have problems. A few outliers isn't a problem, but if 1/3 or more of the team isn't interested, it becomes a nightmare. Writing good software is important and a company should hire professionals that help them meet that goal, but if the team is forced to meet that objective without finding the experience rewarding the quality will soon drop off.
No, I don't think it will ruin your professional life, but it can be pretty miserable if a company is pig-headed and doesn't realize that they need an environment where their workers are finding rewarding work.
I'm not totally sure of the question because it was kind of hard to follow.
Basically... no? I fail to see how an agile principle could 'ruin a professionals' life'... if implemented incorrectly it could waste some of their time, meaning a small lack of experience gained. Other than that, if the methodology fits the business and is implemented correctly, then is is a powerful tool that is useful to everybody.
Any methodology only works if the people are competent.
Silly question imo.
I've certainly seen things packaged as Scrum and Lean make the development process more difficult. Usually the result of managers picking and choosing the aspects that support their purpose, without buying in to the underlying spirit. Any process can work if properly applied, and process can fail if applied poorly.
Cross-functionality isn't a means to make people replaceable. It's a means to solve flow bottleneck problems that decrease productivity.
Cross-functionality doesn't mean that everyone can do everyone else's job, it means that people are capable of assisting with the work step that come (immediately) before their work or (immediately) after their work.
A better term for this is "Local Generalization", or "Special Generalization". And again, the goal has nothing to do with making people more removable from the organization. Creating the kid of people who can use Local Generalization to their advantage costs a lot of money in teaching and guidance. Once an organization makes such an investment in a worker, they're even less motivated to remove them. And organizations tend to only make such investments in people that they already want to keep around.
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My organization has been experimenting with the introduction of more "Agile" methods. We've been trying the Scrum approach for a short while, and most of the team has, more or less, adapted to it. I like it as a whole, but I'm concerned about one potentially severe impact of the methodology: as teams are consistently focused on features and backlog items, and testers are more integrated with the overall development process, it seems like skill sets are becoming blurred, and people are sensing less respect for their individual abilities.
Some of our developers are excellent at server-side technologies and optimization of heavy-weight data provisioning. Others have invested a large amount of their careers learning GUI technologies and have developed a fundamental understanding of users and usability in an application. Neither skill set is better than the other, but they are certainly different.
Is this an inevitable result of the Scrum process? Since everyone on the team (as I understand it) contributes to satisfying the next feature/requirement, backlog item, or testing goal at hand, the underlying philosophy seems to be "anyone can do it." This is, in my experience, simply not true. Most engineers (developers, testers, etc.) have a particular skill set they have honed over the years, and the Scrum methodology, in my mind, tends to devalue those very abilities they were previously respected for.
Here's an example for clarification:
If a sudden change of technology occurs on the server-side data provisioning, and every item on the to-do list for the sprint is based on this new change, the GUI developers (who likely haven't had time to become acclimated with the new technology) might not be able to contribute to the sprint. At the very least, they will need to invest time to get ramped up, and then their code will be suspect because of their lack of experience.
I understand the need for rapid development to discourage "role silos" but doesn't this discount one fundamental reality: people develop skills in accordance to necessity, their interests, or their experiences. People seem to be less motivated when they perceive their position is one of "plug-ability" (e.g. we can "plug" anyone in to do this particular task). How does Scrum address this? If it doesn't, has anyone addressed this when adopting the Scrum methodology?
The short answer is an emphatic NO! Scrum does not blur or depreciate the skills required for specialization. Scrum does not promote generalization.
The long answer is that in Scrum, the most important thing is to get the work "Done". The team, as a team (as opposed to a collection of individual "stars") collaborate, as needed, in order to get the job done. Whatever it takes - however they want (Scrum is about self managing, self motivating teams, right?).
What this means is that a scrum team may be composed of several specialists, who primarily do what they specialized in (DBA, Graphic Design, even technical writers). The team, as a whole, should have all of the skills required to fulfill the requirements. This is not the same as saying that each team member has to have all of the skills aforementioned.
That being said, it is often desired - often by the members themselves - that members other than the specialists be at least adequate in skills different from their specialty. Another poster already mentioned Scott Ambler's "General Specialist". This helps the team when there's too much work of one kind, when the specialist is absent, and it helps the member when he really would like to gain experience outside his specialty.
Given that the team is self organizing, if for some reason a specialist finds himself in the middle of the sprint, without any work to do in his specialty, the best way to deal with it, is to simply ask the specialist what he wants to do. Let the team decide. The specialist can decide to help in his other areas of adequacy, do a POC for the next sprint, "shore-up" the defenses by fixing some long forgotten technical debt, or shine the shoes of the members who are working.
Yup. I don't know if this is the long answer. But it definitely was a long answer.
:-)
The point of Scrum is for the developers to self-organize. We use scrum where I am, and jobs get passively sorted by a person's focus. We don't do it on purpose with a chart and list, it just happens. We all know who's best at what, or what their main/secondary focuses are. If the 'main' person needs help, they get the person/people with a secondary focus in it to help. We do get plenty of tasks not necessarily in line with whatever our particular focus is, but you always know who to ask for help then.
For your example - I don't know that if you say had 3 server guys and 5 gui guys, that you'd expect to get all the work done in that sprint (if the server guys + some help from the others wasn't enough). The way the sprint is supposed to work is that from a prioritized list, the developers pick what they think they can get done in that 30-day timeframe. If that meant the GUI guys needed 2 days of server-side training in order to help, that's what it'd mean. Unless there were concurrent things also high up the list that they could do instead. The sprint tasks are not supposed to be dictated by management as a psuedo-deadline.
If you have a Safari account, there's an interesting mostly case-study book by one of the guy/s who invented scrum.
I've been working as a ScrumMaster for about 18 months and have worked with two different teams. I initially expected to experience the potential issues you raise but this has not been the case. What I generally observe is that the team evolves into a mixture of specialists and generalists as people find the appropriate role for themselves - one that they can enjoy and be successful at. This is self-organisation at work. I have never had a case where our specialists were sitting idle.
If this did occur, I would expect it to be raised as an issue in Sprint Retrospective and the team would discuss how to improve the situation. The most obvious (and brutal) conclusion would be to change the team composition.
I am not sure why skill set will get blurred. There is a fair amount of confusion in the agile world. Scrum is a project management process and not a software development process and should not be seen as one. The engineers have to follow their own methodologies like TDD or extreme programming to add their own part to being agile.
Nothing goes away in scrum.
PM's still document as they go
Architects still architect their components. The only thing is they just delay some major decisions to more responsible point in time.
Developers should still follow best practices such as SOLID principles to enable for refactoring in a consistent manner as features change.
I think Scott Ambler addresses this issue very thoroughly in http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/generalizingSpecialists.htm...
His concept of a Generalizing Specialist is exactly the thing Collective Ownership / Scrum Team calls for, and makes total sense to me.
Its hard to achieve in real life though ;-)
If you find for any reason ('sudden change of technology' or not) that the amount of work required for a system over a sprint is greater than the amount available then there's a problem with your scheduling.
One fix is that, as you suggest, you take programmers from other areas and throw them onto the mix. How well this works depends on the skills of that person and how different the problem domain is, but treating programmers as generic units that can be farmed out as needed is generally not a successful strategy for developing software.
This is still a scheduling problem though.
The best thing about Scrum is exactly the fact that skills do get a bit blurred! The point is to avoid silos at all costs by spreading specialist knowledge across the team and letting people work a bit outside their comfort zone.
Obviously this is not for everybody. Some developers are happy in their own narrow specialist field and such people are more of a hindrance in a Scrum process than an asset, whereas well-rounded and multi-talented people who are determined to get the job done, usually adapt very very well to it and are far more productive.
One of the key benefits of Scrum is to get the whole team actually involved and invested into the project instead of tackling their own special tasks and then riding off to the horizon. I'd claim that for most people, this is a far more rewarding way of working than the conveyor belt -approach of waterfall processes.
So I'd advise to boldly embrace the mixing of skills and having people come together to take down nasty problems instead of relying on specialist silos. The result of teams consisting of motivated people can be surprising.
Sounds like this would lead to more well-rounded developers, and also allow those who are experts in certain areas to continue to contribute their expertise.
I haven't used Scrum much myself (yet), but from your description, these types of teams would lead to a team/organization that is also more well-rounded as a whole - and shouldn't that be the goal of any team?
Handling sudden changes is part of Agile and this may mean that some people have to go off and learn new skills. Course this is more within the general Agile philosophy than anything Scrum-specific. There may be some extreme cases where the customer or business decides to change the world by bringing in something new and thus has to handle the subsequent pain of those people ramping up but if this is what they want and the developers are overruled, then there are only a couple of choices: (Take your lumps and try to handle the major changes) or (quit and get out of there).
While there can be some cases where someone that has specialized in something may be able to do things faster, this doesn't necessarily mean much if that is just one person on the team that is an expert and there is enough work in that area for 10 people for the whole sprint. Should those not an expert simply not do that work and let that one person attempt to get through as much as he or she can? I don't think so but there should be something to be said for those that aren't the best at something still trying to get done what they can get done.
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I'm starting to learn about Scrum, and I'm interested in trying it out with our development team. I have a lot of questions about it...but my biggest mental roadblock is in the actual graphical design.
With our current development cycle [waterfall-esque], our graphical designer lays out the page with all the imagery and such based on a loose PRD. If we were to utilize the methods of Scrum, how would this development take place? I think we're used to seeing the big picture and driving towards it...as opposed to fitting the visual pieces together as we go, which is what I'd expect the Scrum policy for graphical design to be.
Would it be unheard of to at least wireframe all the functionality in the backlog? Or would it be wiser to--for the first sprint--design its functionality in such a way that we can add the new features of other sprints as we go? (i.e. When it's time for a new feature, discuss "Where would this fit into the current design?")
here's how I'd suggest you do it (ie, how we have tried to do it)
Pre-sprint 0: make sure you have a good vision of what you want to do. Doesn't have to be super detailed, but should not be "we want to build a website which is social"
Sprint 0: Developers tool up - setup the CI servers, work on the deployment scripts etc, so all the basic framework is done. At the end of this, you should be able to push a button (worst case: run a single command on a REMOTE server) which takes the code in your source control system, builds it, packages it, runs all the tests you want on it, reports that back, and if possible, installs it on a test server (or atleast results in a package you can install on the test server).
At this time, the designer is doing the wireframes. Their aim is to do basic wireframes for as much of the site as you think you need (think sitemap and flow not fields and pixels). Then, when thats done, work out with the PM's whats most important, and go into detail on that - wireframe. Not pixels YET.
Project managers and the like are working with the designer and the business/stakeholder, writing up stories and tasks for you lot to do and track. Obviously, they need to have an idea of the sitemap etc to do this.
This may take more than one sprint. start with one (I recommend 2-3 week sprints - 1 is too short, 4 is too long), see how much you still need to do etc.
So at the end of sprint 0, you have:
Lots of stories, in priority order (you CAN add more later, infact you will always as requirements change)
A sitemap (ie, a general idea of what the whole thing is going to contain)
Wireframes for the first block of work
All your tools are working and setup
You CI, bug tracking, source control and deployment systems are in place
So then you begin sprint 1
Keep in mind that for the first 3-4 sprints, you will not know how much work you can do in the sprint, so EXPECT to get it wrong! Take off as much work (in the priority order the business/PM has put them in) as you think you can FOR SURE get done. you can always take more later!
You lot develop those pages, and the designer(s) wireframe up the next block of pages (as determined by the PM's). Maybe the designer does the art for those pages, so you can do it in the next sprint
So, you are developing what you have, and the designers are working on stuff for your next sprint.
Of course, they could have a scrum process going too, just they started a sprint earlier!
now repeat until you run out of work
during a sprint, if (say) a requirement changes or something new is added, then a new story is written for that, and it's scheduled into the work. If it's super high priority, it may go at the top and be the top item for the next sprint (which will be 1-2 weeks away, usually). Or it may be a nice to have, so it goes at the bottom - the business decides.
PM's/designers need to know they can change things, but changes DO have consequences, so it's not in their (financial) interest to chop and change back and forward. but requirements DO change, and XP and Scrum deal with this better than waterfall.
Dont forget:
you can stop a sprint at any time and go back to planning, eg if the requirements change too much, or you run out of work
you can schedule more work than you have time to do, as long as that work hasn't been committed to (ie, it's "extra" or "stretch" work)
Your PM should be able to predict when the project will end - look at how much work you did in the last sprint (your velocity), and divide the amount of work left by that number, and you get the number of sprints to go. Easy.
Oh, and read up on story points - dont estimate stories in hours or days. Use points. To bootstrap that, just make the first story you estimate (say) an 8 (the sequence is 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,40,60,100,infinite). Then take the second story, and estimate it relative to the first - is it double the work (13)? half the work (5)? about the same (8)?
At the end of the sprint, add up how many points you did, and that's your velocity. The max amount of work you can COMMIT to do doing in the next sprint is that amount. You CAN always stop the sprint early, or just pull more work off the backlog etc if you run out early. As you go along, your velocity will stabalize.
Damn, I'm sure there are books etc on how to run it, so I'll stop :)
I strongly disagree with the answer provided by Jason. The whole point of Scrum is to get rid of the method where designers first "do their thing" and then go on to other stuff. That's completely and 100% against all lean / Scrum principles!
The way to incorporate designers in a Scrum process? Throw 'em into the mix! Make sure you're not just wrapping a waterfall project into Scrum as that's the best way towards failure! Scrum only works when it's implemented without exceptions. "Scrum, but..." is the worst project model. Organize work so that it's possible for concurrent designing and developing. Don't overdo initial design, but make it a push-pull situation, where both sides of the coin influence the other. The point of Scrum is to iterate, iterate and iterate, so take full benefit from that.
Also, it's pretty lean to actually shun traditional Photoshop-based design altogether. You can read more about this from this excellent blog post in Signal vs. Noise:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1061-why-we-skip-photoshop
I've done this before where the Designers did their thing in the early iterations, and their work product was used by the dev team in later iterations. As the dev team started work, the designers would move ahead to other parts of the project, or possibly to other projects.
I think we're used to seeing the big
picture and driving towards it
You can still do this. Your designers can do a bigger up-front design, and the dev team can use Scrum to iterate towards that.
For the the design part in sprint 0 you can use a technique like Styletyles (http://styletil.es) to determine the graphical style needed for the project. So you dont need a big design upfront and still be agile when you are sprinting.
It's easy peasy! :) Well, let me share how do we do it.
First Sprint
1) Product owner creates wire-frames and add to backlog (we use Yodiz, www.yodiz.com)
2) Our graphic designer create mockups and put them on mockup sharing tool (www.concept.ly)
3) Our developers work on setting up servers. If everything is already ready we have pretty smart Product owner, you will always have items in backlog to select.
Sprint Two
1) Developer start working on the finalized mockups, which were finalized on conceptly.
2) Designer work on other wire-frame added by product owner in backlog.
I told you it's easy!
I'd like to share . I'm the scrum master for a development team of a future social app. This team has in it 1 User Interface designer, 1 User Experience designer(me), 1 front end developer(css,ajax etc), and 3 programmers.
This is our first ever project using a SCRUM framework so it's been quite challenging. The trend during our scrum daily meetings is that our design work are never quite done done because our initial product backlog had stories like 'User wants to be persuaded to sign up' and then we added on that story a 'way to demo' so from there we could determine what needs to be done (i.e. we need to do wireframe, have copywriting done, etc...)
That, could be done better. Itemize every task based on that story, and estimate time for each task. For example, during product backlog, we could from there on create these in order: Site Maps > Task Flows > Wireframes
Now the question is, do we do all these in a sprint? Or should we do this even before any sprint? Defeats the purpose of scrum if we do out of sprints right?
Those who have done user experience design will know that these tasks take quite an amount of time to prepare. So why not make all these part of a sprint as well? Get programmers involved in these tasks as well.
Wireframing is very very important throughout the duration of the project. It's like the blueprint to a building, where its used from start to finish.
So, do an initial wireframe based on the product backlog during your first sprint. And adjust the wireframe accordingly during every other sprint. Our programmers will design their code based on the task flow and then create it visually based on the wireframe.
Oh, btw, dont bother too much about how the product is going to look like (tho having an intial design mockup is always a good thing). Instead, focus on the user needs and wants, and design a very user-centric flow to achieve just that. Our Designer later then figures out what kind of interface he is going to devise. If the wireframe was done proper, the designer will have very few problems designing the user interface. Same goes for creating copywriting.
In summary, work hand in hand during every iteration. For beginners out there (like me) give SCRUM a chance to work for you. If it can work for companies like fantasyinteractive.com , so can it work for you n me :)
p.s. for great wireframes, use omnigraffle (mac) tis the shite!
If we were to utilize the methods of Scrum, how would this development take place?
while this post is quite old, it prompted me to research on my own. i found Jeff Patton's "Twelve emerging practices" for UX designers/practitioners, which i thought to be apt to this question specifically, and quite a useful frame set:
Drive: UX practitioners are part of the customer or product owner team.
Research, model, and design up front - but only just enough.
Chunk your design work
Use parallel track development to work ahead, and follow behind.
Buy design time with complex engineering stories.
Cultivate a user validation group for use for continuous user validation.
Schedule continuous user research in a separate track from development .
Leverage user time for multiple activities.
Use RITE to iterate UI before development.
Prototype in low fidelity.
Treat prototype as specification.
Become a design facilitator.
if you'd like to dig deeper, jeff spells it out agileproductdesign.com.