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by mr_mischief (Prior)
on Dec 12, 2010 at 19:44 UTC ( #876745=note: print w/ replies, xml ) Need Help??

in reply to Nobody Expects the Agile Imposition (Part V): Meetings






Comment on Re: Nobody Expects the Agile Imposition (Part V): Meetings
by JavaFan (Canon) on Dec 13, 2010 at 13:06 UTC
    But that's not the point of daily standups. In an "out-of-the-book" sprint, the team has at the beginning of the sprint split the project into small tasks without deciding who is going to do what. Tasks can be in a small number of states: "not worked on", "being worked on", "blocked" (or impeded), "done". Many teams use a board with columns for the states, and sticky notes for the tasks. During the standup, people move sticky notes from one column to the other. The standup is important to avoid having the same people work on the same task, and to know which tasks can now be worked on because they first need other tasks to be finished. (For instance, if a project involves installing an OS and a database, the task for installing a database cannot be done before the task of installing the OS has finished (which needs to be done after taking the machine out of the box and into the racks (which can only be done after ordering the box (which depends on the task of securing funding, etc)))).

    Note also that in out-of-the-box scrum, you don't estimate how long a project will last, then adjust the estimate during the development. It's the other way around. "We have a month (or 2 weeks, or 2 months, usually nothing longer), what can we do in that period". Traditional project management is usually "We want X, we have Y developers, hence we estimate it's going to take Z days", or "We want X, the deadline is in Z days, hence we estimate we need Y developers". Scrum is "We have Y developers, we have Z days. Product owner, split X into smaller X' features, and we'll estimate how many X's we can do". (Note I'm not giving any judgement whether this is a good idea, and I'm sure everyone can come up with at least one scenario where it isn't going to work - I'm just telling what the reasoning behind scrum is).



      1. Are you correct in your breakdown of the tasks?







      So they wrote a book on managing a to-do list?

      There's nothing that can be done with overpriced slightly tacky paper squares that can't be done in software more reliably. If you must meet in person, at least get a projector and use scheduling software. In/out status of the team members, completed/incomplete/not started status of a subproject, Gantt modeling, dependency tracking, and more are very simple software tasks. If your team can't find software to do those things and can't knock that together in a week then they have no business writing projects that need it.

        Scrum is more than standups.
        Been there, done that. Haven't seen any software that isn't sucky. Would prefer sticky notes over software. Note that scrum doesn't mandate the medium (note also that I'm not advocating scrum in this thread - I'm just explaining how it works). If a team prefers software, it uses software. Our team started with in-house javascript based software, progessed to a wiki-page and now uses nothing at all to keep track of "tasks".

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