No, I'm not talking about this kind of scrum:
scrum 
( P ) PronunciationKey (skr
m)
n.
Sports.
A play in Rugby in which the two sets of forwards mass together around the ball and, withtheir heads down, struggle to gain possession of the ball.
The mass or formation of players during such a play.
Chiefly British. A disordered or confused situation involving a number ofpeople.
intr.v. scrummed, scrum·ming, scrums
To engage in a scrum.
I'm talking about Scrum as an agile development process.
straight from a Scrum website:
What is Scrum?
Scrum is an agile, lightweight process that can be used to manage and control softwareand product development using iterative, incremental practices. Wrapping existingengineering practices, including Extreme Programming and RUP, Scrum generates thebenefits of agile development with the advantages of a simple implementation. Scrumsignificantly increases productivity and reduces time to benefits while facilitatingadaptive, empirical systems development.
Here at Inetium, on my particular project, ourprocess for development wasn't as agile as we had hoped. We had the project broken downinto subsections (phases), yet they weren't small enough to tangibly measure our progressfor the updates that our project managers and client wanted. Instead of telling them,“we're 1400 hours into this current phase“ while we wanted to say“we're a few days from completing our iteration, in which you can have a build ofthe application to test and play around with.“ So the search began for an agileprocess that fit our needs, so we purchased Agile and IterativeDevelopment: A Manager's Guide . The book describes numerous differentagile methods and is very concise on the roles that each individual on the team plays andhow it affects the project. Thispdf file outlines the scrum process in a visual form.
Onto the project itself... So we were in a mix of software cyclesas mentioned before and we needed to change. Thus we introduced the notion of iterationsand Scrum for our second phase of the project. We sat down and defined an iteration basedon our requirements, created a Sprint Goal and Sprint Back Log file to keepmetrics of time, and scheduled daily Scrum meetings at 9AM. There were other aspects ofScrum that went on behind the scenes, at levels in which I'm not involved... and therewere also aspects that we didn't necessarily stick to or changed to fit our project.Essentially, we shaped Scrum into what we foundto be useful for our project and team.
One aspect was the daily Scrum meeting that lasts 15min. by definition, and each team member answers these three questions:
- What did you do since the last Scrum Meeting?
- What are your blocks? (or What is getting in your way?)
- What will you be doing until the next Scrum Meeting?
Theoretically, you'd be standing, it would be short, and not veer off topic. Yet here,we'd always find ourselves talking about implementation or requirements or other topics.That can be fixed and/or worked on.
Our Sprint Back Log (which is a visual representation of the iteration through loggingof time left on iteration tasks), though setup properly and accurately reflected ouriteration, was not kept up to date properly. There was frequent guesstimating on timesand the team focused more on what time they had spent (typical consultant) rather thanhow much of time is left for the task (the purpose of the log). Luckily this wasalmost synonymous for this particular iteration and worked out quite well.
The results of this iteration were very intriguing and actually quite successful! Wecompleted our 30 day (typical) iteration on time and have completed every one of ourtasks. Though the process was some-what-of-a morphed Scrum, I think I can say for theteam that we were pleased and it's always more tangible to see a short iteration beingcompleted. We even scheduled an iteration celebration lunch for the following Mondaydirectly after our next iteration planning meeting.
Stats:
Team Schedule: 86 hours/week
Iteration Estimate: 245 hours
Iteration Actual: 237.5 hours
Tasks: 17 tasks complete
Comments from the team:
coming soon...
