Phase 1 of Scrum TAW project is terminated

September 24, 2010 Leave a comment

Hi all the first phase of the scrum project is finished. The good news is that next week a phase 2 will start with new sprints to do and new user stories to implement.
During these final days of phase 1 we have done an internal assesment on what was fine with the Scrum methodology compared to the standard way of working.

Here the main points:

  1. Customer feedback all along
  2. Focus on features needed by the market
  3. Remove waste due to features not being developed
  4. Very well perceived by the customer
  5. Motivating, team spirit
  6. Productivity, efficiency (less time spent on sizing, spec, coordination)
  7. More freedom, team is empowered to devise solutions and take decisions -> More motivation. Team feels thus the owner of the feature, and not a simple executant of a task (notion of commitment)
  8. Work as a team, with a common objective, belong to a group
  9. knowledge sharing: learn more, on more various topics, knowledge on general on the product ->Can propose improvments
  10. Reactivity to changes
  11. Customer satisfaction, roadmap evolves during development
  12. Continuous improvement by the team via retrospectives (process, methodology, tools, etc.)
  13. Whole team in the same room
  14. Short-term commitment (pressure curb)
  15. No Parkinson law or Student syndrome
  16. Always work on new tasks (no lassitude)
  17. Team involvement during definition of functional needs
  18. Dev gets a global vision of the feature, which makes it easier to challenge the requirements, and propose more viable alternatives
  19. Marketing team has a better vision of how the product works, its shortcomings, the main area of improvements
  20. Integrate testing and quality much earlier, and done as part of the development cycle (as opposed to a verifying entity after the dev has been done)
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Handover is started

September 21, 2010 Leave a comment

We are in the second week of handover. During this sprint of 2 weeks we have only one user story to implement and then we have other general tasks as the delivery our CR to the integration stream. We have also some demos with teams impacted by our changes to show the new functionalities. Phase 1 of our first Scrum experience is almost finished.

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Commitment of Sprint 6

September 10, 2010 Leave a comment

Hi all, it’s the day of the demo. Here the sprint 6 commitment status.

Sprint 6 commitment

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Sprint 5 – Retrospective Meeting

August 20, 2010 Leave a comment

Here a photo from the retrospective meeting of sprint 5. You can see the whiteboard with the “Well” and “To be improved” list of things. Our avatars mark the points we considered more important.

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Sprint 4 – Retrospective Meeting

July 30, 2010 Leave a comment

Hi all, sprint 4 is finished! Just after the demo (sprint review) we have started the retrospective meeting trying to go faster to do also the sprint 5 planning meeting in the same day. For the retrospective meeting here the agenda we have followed:

– Timeline of sprint 4
– “Well” and “To be improved” items
– Consensus on items found
– Actions to take for next sprint

Below a description for each point.

– Timeline of sprint 4

Sprint 4 – timeline

This time we have time-boxed this part to 5 minutes only. Normally we start we this “timeline” view of the sprint to show visually the main facts that happened during the sprint helping to remember maybe impediments or difficulties we have faced during the sprint.

– “Well” and “to be improved” items

Sprint 4 – “well” and “to improved”

In this part of the meeting every team member including the PO takes 10 minutes to write down things that go well during sprint and things that instead should be improved. When everybody has finished, every team member tells what he/her have found writing them on the whiteboard (Normally I’m the official writer 😉 ).

– Consensus on items found

Sprint 4 – vote for items found

After the definition of the “well” and “to be improved” items, every team member takes 5 small faces representing him/her and put them near the points he/she consider the most important for the next sprint.

For this sprint the most voted “to be improved” points have been:
– The late validation of PO on user stories
– Risks linked to some user stories not taken into account
– Continuous integration platform
– UI dependency and small knowledge about UI flows
– Test scenario for new PTRs (problem) found

– Actions to take for next sprint

Sprint 4 – actions definition

This is the last part of the retrospective meeting and it consists in defining actions for the next sprint to solve the “to be improved” items chosen before. In particular for the next sprint (sprint 5) we have created the following actions:

  1. Inform suddenly the PO and fix the time limit of validation to the day after (late validation of PO on user stories)
  2. Take into account risks to prioritize user stories (risks linked to some user stories not taken into account)
  3. Schedule meetings with NRE team to follow-up the process to put in place the continuous integration platform (continuous integration platform)
  4. Add in the technical documentation the UI flows (UI dependence and small knowledge about UI flows
  5. Update QTP and QC tests taking into account the PTRs scenario (test scenario for new PTRs found)

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Sprint 4 – Scrum board status

July 30, 2010 Leave a comment

Sprint4 - Board Status

Sprint 4 - scrum board final status

Here you can see our Scrum board at the end of sprint 4. There is still two unfinished user stories (not done). At the top of the board you can see instead the green posts-it where we write the actions coming from the retrospective meetings.

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Thinking to solutions

July 21, 2010 Leave a comment

Here an example of how we use the small whiteboard we have in the scrum office. It is mainly used to design the new functionalities 🙂

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Sprint 4 – Acceptance tests

July 15, 2010 Leave a comment

Here the part of the scrum board dedicated to our acceptance test ideas for different user stories. Normally these test ideas are written during the sprint planning meeting but they are also updated if new ideas are coming or something changes. The main point having them on the board is that everybody in the team can always know the overall test ideas for every user stories.

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First demo and retrospective meeting

May 28, 2010 Leave a comment

Today we did the first demo (sprint review meeting) of the functionalities developed so far. Unfortunately this morning when we arrived there was a bug on the demo server (we updated the last code just before leaving the evening before) , we fixed it before the meeting but we choose to do not show at all the user story “search the arranged trips” even if in any case it was not done. During the demo we found a problem on the story “search travellers” so our Product Owner decided to do not validate the story. There was just a little bug that we fixed in one minute in the afternoon but the impact was declared not acceptable to consider the story as done.

The afternoon was dedicated to the sprint retrospective meeting where we identified and analysed the points that should be done better and we put some new actions for the new sprint. The main points are related to:
– Test process
—- do a brainstorming session to identify the test at the start of the sprint
—- the person that write the tests is not the same that execute the tests
—- verify a story at the end by someone in a challenging way
– Done criteria
—- be more precise on the done criteria with more interaction between the team members and the PO

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Last day of the sprint

May 27, 2010 Leave a comment

Today was the last day of the sprint. We finished almost all the stories, only on the “search trips” we still have to do something on the UI. Tomorrow there will be the first demo where we will present the functionalities developed so far.

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