Agile Pain Relief Consulting

One Year of Scrum – Lessons Learned

This is a series of posts that will focus on seven key lessons I’ve learned over the past year of implementing and coaching scrum.

I became interested in Agile development in 2000 after failing at every other approach I’d ever tried: waterfall, RUP, drawing UML diagrams (I spent a lot of time perfecting the diagrams and less producing a working product).

In Jan 06 a team I was a member of started doing daily standups during a crisis. When the problem was solved we decided the standups had been effective at sharing information so we decided to keep them. After a reorg in Oct 06 we decided to start iterations and add regular Planning, Review and Retrospective meetings. So began our journey with Scrum.

Lessons Learned

I will post the details of these lessons at the rate of one or two a week until I’m done.

Programming note – the focus of these posts will not be cheer leading. Scrum has worked for us – if it didn’t we wouldn’t keep doing it. Instead the focus will be on the things that were hard.

           


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  2. Daily meetings where the Scrum/Implementation teams talks about:
    – What they did yesterday.
    – What they are doing today.
    – Where they are blocked.

    They’re incredibly helpful at breeding collaboration and understanding dependencies when executing a request from the Product Owner.

  3. “Standup” being because some people advocate having the meeting standing up. I have colleagues just starting out with Scrum who tell me that their daily meetings take an hour or more. I’ve not been present at any of them, but I assume that people are waffling about all sorts of other stuff rather than just answering the three questions. (The “other stuff” may be valid and useful, but misplaced in this meeting).

    Standing up, so the theory goes, puts people in a different frame of mind to the Standard One-Hour Status Meeting and makes them less inclined to waffle.

  4. Russ – its not a stupid question. A Daily Standup or Daily Scrum meeting is at the core of Scrum. At the start of everyday the team meets to answer three questions:

    1) What did I do yesterday?
    2) What will I do today?
    3) What roadblocks do I have?

    The questions are answered in the spirit of sharing information with teammates not reporting to the ScrumMaster.
    The meeting runs a maximum of 15 minutes.