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Wednesday 23 April 2014
Seven Unique Ways To Breath In New Life In Your Sprint Retrospectives
Sprint
retrospectives are an important part of scrum methodology. For Agile
practitioners, retrospectives hold a special significance, and offer an insight
into the self-learning capabilities supported by scrum.
The primary
objectives of a sprint retrospective meeting are:
· Display the user stories to the stakeholders, which
have been developed by the team during the daily sprints
· Have the user stories accepted by the investors as
“shippable”
· Discuss and review the entire sprint, and analyze it
to find how the sprinting process can be improved upon
· Find what lessons can be learnt from the sprint, and
how the team can benefit from prior findings and experiences
One of the issues
faced by the scrum team is the team members end up discussing the same issues
and problems in most of the retrospective meetings. The team feels it is
discussing the same topics again-and-again, and therefore it is redundant to
hold retrospectives. In all aspects, the retrospectives seem to be going
“stale” and the team might be just holding it because scrum advocates it. The
learning and self correction process stops in such cases, and the retrospective
loses its importance and functionality.
So how can you pump
in new life in the retrospectives? A few pointers may help you improve your
meetings.
1. Rotating the
leadership
Instead of the scrum master facilitating the meeting, invite the team members to temporarily assume
the role of a scrum master and conduct the meeting. Each member takes turns and
facilitates the meeting in his or her own particular way and manner. The
members can be asked to experiment with newer adaptations and ways of holding
the meeting.
2. Changing the
questions
The two standard
questions most commonly asked during the meeting are:
1. What did we do well this time?
2. What can be possibly improved upon in the next sprint?
Instead, try asking
the question:
· What actually happened during the sprints, and how did
it occur?
Individuals tend to
look at things from their own perspectives, and at times, they might fail to
comprehend the true situation if they are forced to look at issues from a
different point of view which they are not familiar with. Asking questions
which they find easy to answer can go a long way in making the retrospective
more interesting and useful.
3. Varying the
process
Each scrum team has
its own method of conducting the meeting. While some teams prefer group
discussions during the retrospectives, a few of the teams follow the
traditional pattern of having one member demonstrate his or her work to the
stakeholders. Whichever process you follow, try to change it by including
variations into the meeting pattern. A recommended method is to use histograms
indicating member satisfaction levels. The survey can be conducted anonymously
and the findings presented to the entire team. Suggestions can be availed from
the team members as to what new aspects ought to be incorporated to make the
meeting interesting.
4. Thinking about
unique perspectives
Individuals and
people who are not directly connected with the scrum project, but are still
attached to the project somehow can be invited to attend the meeting. Vendors
and system deployment personnel have different insights to offer since they are
directly connected with the market and have a “working knowledge” about
consumer psychology and requirements. Their participation can help the scrum
team to avail a broader perspective regarding how the development of user
stories should be ideally carried out.
5. Changing the
focus
Every team has a
certain focal point, which it concentrates upon while developing the project.
Switching the focus can also prompt the team to come up with new ideas about
how the scrum process can be improved upon. If the team is concentrating too
much upon the engineering practices, the focus could be changed to
collaborative working and solving technical issues by sharing out the problems.Read more on http://blog.quickscrum.com/post/2014/04/09/Seven-Unique-Ways-To-Breath-In-New-Life-In-Your-Sprint-Retrospectives.aspx
Tuesday 22 April 2014
Monday 7 April 2014
An Overview Of Scrum Methodology
Scrum is a unique framework
specially designed to build a versatile product. The framework supports a
dynamic design, which allows the features and functionalities linked with the
product to be changed, along with the real time changes occurring in the
ongoing market conditions. Generally, a scrum project is started when the
stakeholders or the investors desire to develop a product for marketing and
selling purposes.
Scrum roles
Scrum is basically a
team process. There are three important roles in scrum:
· The Product Owner
Responsible for the work to be done in the scrum
project.
Plays the servant-leader role, ensures that scrum is
properly implemented in the project, and acts as a facilitator.
· The development team members
Undertakes the product development in the form of
sprints and actually gives “birth” to the product.
Daily sprints
A sprint is the
fundamental unit of developing the product in scrum methodology. Actually, the entire product is developed in
short bursts of development activity known as “sprints”. Each sprint generally
lasts for two weeks. It can, however, extend up to four weeks if required, but
in practice it generally lasts for only two weeks. A fully functional, or a
“shippable” product feature or functionality is delivered at the end of each
sprint.
Scrum artifacts
or objects
Scrum includes three
important artifacts which facilitate the scrum
process. They are:
· The Product Backlog
It consists of the user stories, or the list of features and functionalities which
actually define the entire product to be developed.
· The Sprint Backlog
A certain portion, or a subset of the product backlog,
is transferred to the sprint backlog for development purposes during the sprint.
· The Product Increment
It constitutes the list of features and
functionalities which have been developed successfully by the development team,
and is ready for “shipping”.
Scrum meetings
Scrum also requires
five team activities or meetings, which are:
· Product Backlog Refinement
The meeting includes updating the product backlog
items or the user stories with the latest updates and feedback availed from the
stakeholders, and resetting the priority of the backlog items on the basis of
their importance.
· Sprint Planning
Scheduled just before a sprint is to be carried out, the
meeting is used to plan which tasks should be taken up for development by the
team, and to clear the doubts or issues concerning the development.
· Daily Scrum
The meeting is held just before the sprint commences
for the particular day. The purpose is to discuss three important questions
associated with daily sprinting:
-
What was done
yesterday?
-
What is to be
done today?
-
Are there any
difficulties?
· Sprint Review
Once a sprint is carried out, the product owner
compares the user stories developed by the team, whether they fulfill the
acceptance criteria. The review functions as a “learning” activity, and the
team uses the prior experience to avoid potential pitfalls from occurring in
the future sprints.
· Sprint Retrospective
Once the development is carried out in sprints, and
the product owner accepts the tasks as “Done”, it is required to demonstrate
the successfully completed user stories to the stakeholders and the end users.
The retrospective also helps to obtain a feedback from the individuals who are
actually going to use the product.
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