My Agile Team: On The (Scrum) Road Again

February 9, 2009 by mattgrommes

Picture courtesy of qmnonic on flickr

Hello and welcome to the start of my new series called My Agile Team here on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com. This series is a sequel of sorts to the My First Agile Project series. From here on out, the plan for this bunch of articles is to follow my team as we move from being on one big project where we (mostly) used Scrum to being on multiple projects where we will (hopefully) really use Scrum. We all intend to learn from our mistakes the first time around and to adhere more closely to the recommendations that make Scrum work so well. But, as everyone knows, when the rubber hits the road even the best of intentions can go by the wayside, accidentally or intentionally.

In this first post in My Agile Team, I'll talk a little bit about the team's plans and what happened during the first 2 weeks of our transition. In our last project, Scrum was brought to us by the vendor and our management signed on fairly enthusiastically. This time though, we're on our own to implement and stick to the plan, at the same time moving from a big project we all worked on to multiple maintenance projects. We know what we want to do, but will that turn out to be what management wants to do? Will we even be able to make the transition successfully? Keep reading to find out!

As I said, we're coming off everybody being on one big project for the past 18 months or so. A lot of the team came to the company during that project so that's all they know. Now that we're live with that project, we're moving to working on all the things that were neglected during the past 18 months. This includes maintenance on a few different bigger internal applications as well as building some new things for various departments in the company. Since we all like Scrum and want to keep going with it, we need to figure out how to incorporate these multiple projects into our Sprints.

Right now, we're still doing cleanup on the last remaining items from the big project. We're doing 1 week sprints in order to get things out quickly but I'm not sure this is the best idea. If you're on a Scrum team doing 1 week sprints, please talk about your experience in the comments as I would love to hear about how you structure things so that you can get enough work done. The server admin part of our IT department has Wednesday evenings set aside for production deployments so we're working around that. We have to have everything that needs to go into production done and tested before Wednesday evening. In practice this means it has to be ready by Tuesday at the latest so the testers can get their hands on it. Then we do planning on Thursday. The best thing about 1 week sprints is that our planning meetings don't exceed 30 or 45 minutes. During our old 4 week sprints we would struggle to get all of our planning done in a full day. Because of the Wed. deadlines, we only end up getting a couple of days worth of actual work in so after another couple of weeks we're going to 2 week sprints. This will give us much more breathing room while not blowing up our planning meetings. Once we start putting other projects in the mix, we'll see how short we can keep our meetings.

Luckily, our management hasn't been super strict about the production procedures since we just recently we live. We've pushed emergency/important fixes on days other than Wed. without problems, although it's frowned on. We've also been allowed to do our own pushes to production without the deployment paperwork (it's in Jira, our bug tracking system, but I think of it as paperwork) we normally have to go through. Since we're an insurance company, we have to adhere to pretty significant regulation and auditing procedures. These relaxations won't last long though so we'll be on standard operating procedure pretty soon.

In addition to our sprint tasks, we've been taking care of the normal daily fires that pop up with new production software. Even with this added load, we've been pretty good about finishing our tasks. It's very nice to have a list of things to work on rather than just scrambling around trying to get everything done.

So far, so good is my review of the last 2 weeks. It's been crazy but good. We haven't had any major problems with anything we wrote and we're taking care of everything at a quick clip. Next time in My Agile Team we'll probably be done with our last cleanups on the big project and finish up the 1 week sprints as well. Stay tuned and hear how it went! Thanks for listening and if you have advice for us in making this transition, please post in the comments. We need it! :)

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