February 2007 - Posts
As I have already posted, we are managing our project in Scrum methodology.
I made some changes in the original methodology in order to improve our productivity at our specific organization.
Here are some of them:
Daily Meeting:
- The daily meetings will be stand-up meeting.
- We had a problem to start these meetings exactly in time because each computer shows a different time. To resolve this problem I bought a new big clock, and I hang it in the center of the room. The daily meeting is now accordantly to this time.
Scrum reviews:
The first Scrum review meeting wasn't so productive because some programmers lost the focus when the user started to give his criticism on the product. I think it happened because we didn't have a big screen, so we showed the product in a regular computer screen (and in our room), and only a few people could look at the screen at same time.
Solutions:
- To set these meetings at the meeting room. At the meeting room we have a big screen. I hope that it will cause each team member to become more aware to all the project parts.
- Trying not to bring all of them to this meeting.
- I summarized this meeting and put the summary at the team site.
Scrum retrospectives:
· I think that the scrum retrospective meeting is one of the important meetings, but it could be a waste of time, it's depends what you do with the decisions you make in those meetings. If one of the team members suggests doing something and all of the team members agree we need to do it, we must be committed to this decision (and to avoid the situation of "only talking and be doing nothing "). I put all the team decisions in a respective place in the team site. I decide to put it in web part that looks like missions list ("missions format"), it will give us the ability to track any decision (in the next Scrum retrospective), and to check our progress.
· We decided to be more productive by using community knowledge sites of our organization, not to "start everything from scratch" and to search a lot over the net in order to find technical solutions. Try not to interrupt our friends in things that we can solve by ourselves (even if it can take more time). Use the outlook for the main communication tool and for staffs that we need from another team member but can be delayed. Improve the self time management.
Time of sprint:
· The original time of a sprint is one month. Because our project period time is very short we decide to shrink the spring period to two weeks.
· According to the scrum methodology a sprint is equivalent to iteration (unlike other methods in witch, in a month there is one sprint and four iterations).
· We gave the users more time to change their priority list of the project. Thanks to that we can avoid developing requirements that the business value of them was reduced.
Last Thursday we finished our first applicative sprint .There was another sprint (sprint 0) that focused on infrastructure and on the building of the skeleton of our application. Last Sunday we had two summary meetings about finishing the sprint: Sprint review meeting and Sprint Retrospective meeting.
You probably ask yourself:
· What are the purposes of those meetings?
· What are the goals of those meeting?
· What is the different between these two meetings?
· How those meeting can help me?
· Are these meetings a waste of time?
Please relax, I'll explain everything…
I'll start with the sprint review meeting. The main goal of the sprint review meeting is to present the project status on the end of the sprint. We usually invite managers, product owners, users and everyone who are interested to see the project progress.
For a good brainstorm we should demonstrate the product functionality (only a complete work that we committed at the beginning of the sprint). It will help us to clarify the items that will add on the next sprint.
On those meetings the team should talk about what went wrong and what went right on the last sprint.
The second meeting is the Retrospective. The main goal of the retrospective meeting is to look back on last sprint, and to think together how can we improve our enjoyable and productive work on the next sprint? The sprint review looks at "What" the team is building whereas the Retrospective looks at "How" they are building. In this meeting the team can talk about all the things that affect on the product development.
We have a daily meeting every morning in our office. Those meeting are managed by the scrum master(Shani Raba - the second team leader or me). In those meeting the scrum master is asking the team members (one person talks at a time) 3 questions:
1. What did to you do since the last Daily Scrum meeting?
2. What will you intend to do between now and the next Daily Scrum meeting?
3. What are the obstacles that can hit your productivity?
There is no place to questions about design, architecture, specifications and etc in those meeting.
The project manager and the product owner are invited to those meetings but they can't talk.
I started a new job (my second job as team leader) in a new project(One project with two teams).
We decided to develop our project with the scrum methodology.
Scrum is one of the agile methodologies, which focus on some major things like:
· Quick response to a competition.
· The ability to develop quickly, high priority staffs for your costumer in maximum productivity.
I'll write some posts on this subject in the next few months.
Our project started officially in the beginning of this year. In the first spirit (we called it "Infrastructure spirit") we organize our new office, open a new solution and decided on the relevant architecture and infrastructure that we'll going to use in our project.
Our main technology is .Net v2.0 with GIS engine (of ESRI Company).
Hi my name is Avi Wortzel.
I'm working in a big computer company, as a team leader.
I'll write here about a lot of things:
· .Net
· C#
· Asp.net
· Com+
· Gis(ESRI Software)
· Management
· Analysis &.Design
· Life
· Trips
· And more...
I really hope that you will visit my blog, write me feedback, give me some advices or just read my posts.