tales from the scrum
TRANSCRIPT
Tales from the Scrum
Andrew Hedges, [email protected]
1
Andrew Hedges, lead UI developer for Vianet International.Vianet connects travellers to experiences by providing travel-related information and services, most prominently accommodation booking.
…a project management method foragile software development.”
Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)
“Scrum is…
2
How many of you……are familiar with scrum?…have been on a scrum team?
Scrum features…• Self-organising, cross-functional teams
• A product backlog of prioritised work
• Completion of backlog items in short iterations or “sprints”
• Daily stand-ups
• Sprint planning and retrospective meetings
Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)
3
“If you have all your meetings standing up, you can’t fail.” —Douglas Crockford, Chief JavaScript Architect for Yahoo!
Pig or chicken?
4
Do you know the difference between dedication and commitment? Anyone here have bacon & eggs for breakfast?
Pig or chicken?
5
The chicken was dedicated. The pig was committed.In scrum, the pigs are those people who are committing to finishing the work. Everyone else is, at most, an interested observer.
Photo credit: codinghorror.com
6
Can anyone name the software development process most often contrasted with scrum?
Waterfall Process1. Requirements gathering
2. Design
3. Implementation
4. Testing and debugging
5. Deployment
6. Maintenance
Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model
7
Waterfall Drawbacks• Change is expensive
• Up-front requirements gathering encourages “kitchen sink” approach
• Client involvement limited to requirements gathering & UAT phases
• Command-and-control is so 1989
8
9
So, if you have one of these, by all means use the waterfall process.
10
About a year ago, my company, Vianet……partnered with a little company based in Wellington that some of you may have heard of……to build a website to help travellers book accommodation in New Zealand.
11
This is the result, and we’re pretty happy with it.
12
I’m not here to tell you that if you adopt scrum everything is going to be sweetness and light. We definitely had our struggles.
…the number of story points the teamcan be expected to complete
if all goes as planned.”
“Velocity is…
13
Our biggest struggle being the project schedule.In scrum, work is broken into chunks called “user stories”. The team assigns a number of “story points” to each story depending on the complexity of the work relative to past work.
0
33
66
99
132
165
April May June July August September
Story points -vs- Time
14
When I started with Vianet in April of this year, we had a backlog of around 165 story points.At the time, the team was completing around 33 story points per sprint. We projected we would finish around the first week of September. We were told we had to launch by July.
15
So, we abandoned scrum and started working more. Now, anyone who’s worked nights and weekends for any extended period of time under stressful conditions can imagine what this must have been like.
Lessons Learned• You can’t get blood from a turnip
• Scrum teams work best when all parties are physically located in the same place
• Scrum requires a lot of trust between management, customers and developers
• Minimal distractions + plenty of sleep = happy, productive developers!
16
Conclusion: I’d never worked on a scrum team before and I was definitely sceptical, but now I wouldn’t want to work any other way. Scrum minimises cost and risk to the customer by building change into the process and allowing the team to deliver only what the customer actually needs.
We’re hiring!:-)
17