Going Agile: 2 Weeks On The Life Of a Scrum Team

The Ubuntu Certification team is fully distributed and has now been running Scrum for over 9 months. The team has members in Canada&US, Europe and Asia. I have been blogging about several parts of our scrum experience, now is time to piece it all together!

We run in 2 week iteration cycles within a larger 6 month release cadence. Here is what those two weeks look like:

Day1 (Thursday)- Planning session

We run the planning session (30 minutes) just after the previous iteration Demo session – No room to breath! The reason for doing this is just down to timezone and trying to get as many people as possible into this sessions.

We host the planning session in Mumble, and we review the backlog for the next iteration. We found it a bit dull just for the Product Owner to explain what each story was about. Instead, we ensure that everyones participation by agreeing the definition of done for the stories. This eliminates any misunderstandings of what needs to be deliver and ensure that everyone is paying attention.

Just after the planning session, the scrum team gets together to flesh out the task-board for the iteration. At this point the stories are re-size via IRC planning poker: At the count of three by the Scrum Master every one pastes a t-shirt size on the IRC channel.

Following the poker planning, the team discusses possible implementations and they write down tasks in the IRC channel, to be later translated by the Scrum Master into the backlog. Read more of this post

Going Agile: The Ultimate Scrum Google Doc Template

While trying to work out the best way to adopt Scrum in the Ubuntu Certification team, I didn’t want to commit to an expensive process tool. So we have end up developing overtime the ultimate Google Document SCRUM tool.

I didn’t want to spent too much time reviewing tools and shopping for better prices rather than working on embedding the process correctly in the team. We might eventually move to a hosted “funky” web 2.0 solution, but in the meantime, Google Docs is doing the job just fine.

I thought that it will be great to share our backlog template with everyone, so I have created a public template with some fake stories. Here is the breakdown on how it works: Read more of this post

Going Agile: A few iterations under the belt

I wrote recently about the Ubuntu Hardware Certification team transition to Scrum.  We have since completed a few iterations, which means that the Planning and Demo sessions are in full swing. I am also happy to say that we now have a full-time Scrum Master in the team. One of the key advantages of this is that I get to sit in the demos and ask questions “from the outside”

Because of the global distribution of my team, we have end up with back-to-back Demo/Review and Planning meetings. This is how it goes:

3pm UTC – Demo meeting (30 minutes)

The Scrum Master runs (using Mumble) through all the user stories in the backlog.  Previous to the meeting, team members have posted links to their demos. We share the demos using a “virtual meeting” tool.  We end up settling for Spreed, as we already had some company accounts ( but I still secretly love yuuguu!).

At the end of each demo we [product owner, scrum master and me] give our opinion on whether the user story is completed or should be carried over to the next iteration (or later). Read more of this post

Going Agile: Planning for the Demo and Planning meetings

Now that we are scrumming daily and we have agreed a 2 weeks cadence, it is time to start planning for the next set of meetings: Planning, Demos (Reviews) and Retrospectives.

Scrum has four meetings or ceremonies that you must do within a iteration. Here is how they are described by the Scrum Alliance

• Planning: the team meets with the product owner to choose a set of work to deliver during a sprint
• Daily scrum: the team meets each day to share struggles and progress
• Demo/Reviews: the team demonstrates to the product owner what it has completed during the sprint
• Retrospectives: the team looks for ways to improve the product and the process.

Show me the money!

The value in Demo meetings is that you get to see what the team has done and how it brings value to your customers. However, it is not as simple as it sounds… there are two things that can make a Demo inefficient:

• Lack of preparation – people scrambling for demos, you hear things such as “it used to work 2 hours ago, but it is broken now due to work for the next iteration”
• Old habits (die hard) – the tendency is still to ask people “did you finish?”, and  then tick the box, rather than “show me what you did?”

This is pretty challenging to do remotely, hence I have enlisted the help of technology. Read more of this post