Category: review

A Simple Scrum Sprint Review

January 21, 2009 by Peter Stevens

Picture courtesy of cole24@Flickr

At the end of the sprint, the Product Owner, Team and Scrum Master meet to review the progress of the sprint. The product owner has to evaluate the state of the project so s/he can decide what to do next. How does the Product Owner ensure that s/he gets a complete and correct understanding about the state of the project, including all inconvenient truths? Here is a simple agenda/meeting template to follow, to make sure all the bases are covered.

Last week, I introduced that concept of a Sprint Contract to define the parameters of the sprint. The factors Scope, Quality, Time and Cost will be familiar to any project manager. Scope is defined by the stories and in particular their size. Quality is defined primarily by the definition of done. Time is fixed by the sprint duration. An upper limit on the costs is set by the team size * sprint duration, after adjusting for absences and other tasks.

A simple sprint review needs to

1. Confirm that the team has delivered on its commitments
2. Confirm that the overall project is on track
3. Examine the functionality which has been delivered.

My First Agile Project Part 8: 9 Things We Disliked (and Liked) about ScrumWorks

October 20, 2008 by mattgrommes

Picture courtesy of Danube and me

This installment of My First Agile Project is going to be a little different than the previous ones (Table of Contents for the series available at the end of the post). Today I'm going to tackle the topic of tools. During the first year or so of our project we used ScrumWorks by Danube. It was brought to us by our vendor along with the Scrum methodology. After our license ran out we didn't like ScrumWorks enough to get our own license or even go with the free version, which I'll go into more detail about below.

For our last couple of sprints, we've been making due with a whiteboard and evaluating other tools. The one I like the best and we'll probably be going with is VersionOne, which I'll be talking about in more detail next week. Honestly VersionOne makes ScrumWorks look old-fashioned and barely functional. I had a list of things I didn't like about ScrumWorks and one of the first things I noticed during my initial demo was that VersionOne didn't do any of those things, obviously a big selling point. This week's post is that list of pros and cons about ScrumWorks.

Choosing a tool can be very important in a lot of software development and choosing where to put your backlog and tasks is extra important to Scrum. Since the whiteboard/corkboard + stickies/index card approach is basically free, you want to choose a tool that gives you some extra benefit. Read on for my team's pros and cons about ScrumWorks and hopefully it'll provide some insight on this important decision.