Before today, we were working in an informal agile process with fairly short development cycles. We work as a team but often developers would be unaware of new features that others were working on. A big problem with this is that it makes it difficult for another team member to pick up where someone left off.
Enter our new project, code name
Nucleus. Dave and I have been planning for a few months the vision and features of the project and we formally kicked it off today - Hooray! We were introduced to a new project process called
Scrum through Visual Studio 2010 and
Telerik's Team Pulse product. Scrum is an agile practice that gets the entire team involved in nearly the entire process from planning to tasks to conducting demos of the work completed.
With our first stab of Scrum, we will start with the following 2 week Sprint Schedule.
- Day 1: Sprint Planning Meetings
- Part I (4 hours max): Participants include Product Owner and Scrum Master
- Determine focus of the Sprint and flag possible Sprint Backlog items
- Part I (4 hours max): All Team Members participate
- Discuss in detail each flagged Sprint Backlog item
- Use Scrum Poker to estimate effort
- Determine actual Sprint Backlog and assign work to team members
- Day 2-10: Daily Sprint Meeting (15 minute max)
- Team members answer:
- What have you done since the last meeting?
- What will you do from now until the next meeting?
- Is there anything holding up your work?
- Day 6: Requirements Planning (4 hour max)
- Participants include Product Owner and Scrum Master
- Add and edit the Product backlog
- Additional stakeholders may be invited
- Day 10: Sprint Review and Retrospective (4 hour max)
- Demo functionality added from the Sprint.
- Reflect on the Sprint to determine what worked, what didn't work and what would we change in the next Sprint.
Additionally we sprinkled into Sprint a few formal code reviews.
We had an outstanding Day 1 in our first ever Sprint. We played a little Scrum Poker, talked about backlog items and by the end of the day we all had our tasks outlined for the rest of the Sprint.
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