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I am new to Scrum and I am trying to use it for website support and maintenance.
For website support and maintenance, we often receive small tasks, for example: replace a banner on homepage, change phone number on contact page, remove image xyz on article 123, etc... I don't know how to deal with these small tasks in Scrum.
At the moment, I create a single task in backlog, and a single Sprint for each task. Then, execute each task individually. Am I right?
In Scrum we have fixed length, repeating sprints. We bring work to the sprint, rather than creating sprints from tasks.
This is useful for a number of reasons, including:
After a while we get to know the capacity of a sprint.
We know at the start of the sprint what we will be doing and there is no change to the sprint goal during the sprint. This stability helps the team get organised.
The regular cadence helps the team get into a rhythm of planning, executing and then adapting.
Scrum isn't as effective if:
You don't have a team of 3-9 people
Work items and priorities change frequently and stable sprints are not possible
From your description, I wonder if Scrum is the best agile framework for your team.
Perhaps you might consider using Kanban?
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I have a number of doubts associated with Agile methodology. I'm assuming the sprint span is of 2 weeks.
If tester gets a number of defects in the first half of second week which are of high priority, what should the developer do if there is a
good amount of stories remaining untouched?
What should the developer do if his work doesn't complete within 2 weeks time?
What should the scrum master do, if the there is unfinished work?
What should the team do if the tester finds some defects of the previous sprints?
I have found these kind of questions from some interview questions list.
Could anyone please explain me more on this.
Q1.
It is considered a good practice to prioritise completing work over starting new work. So, in your example, it would make sense for the developer to focus on fixing defects rather than starting new stories.
Remember, the goal of a sprint is to complete valuable work, not to have lots of work in progress.
Q2.
If the team feels they won't complete the work they planned in the sprint then they should let the Product Owner know. This helps to set the expectations of the Product Owner and gives them an opportunity to re-prioritise based on the new information.
Failure to complete work in a sprint is usually a result of either taking too much work in to the sprint or something unexpected impacting on the team during the sprint. Neither of these are a disaster, but a team may wish to bring them up in their retrospective to see if there are any lessons to be learned.
Q3.
If there is unfinished work in a sprint then it does not contribute towards the velocity calculation for the team. Usually this means the velocity goes down and so the Scrum Master would encourage the team to bring less work in to future sprints.
Q4.
If the tester finds defects from previous sprints then they should be raised with the Product Owner and added to the backlog. If the Product Owner regards fixing the defects as a priority they may suggest bringing them into the current sprint. It would be up to the team to decide if this is appropriate and they may wish to remove some existing planned work to compensate for the added scope.
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Is there a methodology where the process combines Scrum and Kanban and has both fixed sprint schedules and project backlog? I've heard of Scrumban and Kanplan but I'm not sure which is which.
Thanks.
Kanban is a method to visualize and improve whatever you do currently. The Kanban Method encourages you to visualize your current process on a Kanban board, establish a pull mechanism to ensure team members take up new work when that actually have capacity, and improve the flow of work thru your process.
If you are currently doing Scrum and you apply Kanban on top of it to improve your team's performance, you are doing what is popularly called Scrumban.
Kanban helps Scrum teams identify and resolve bottlenecks in their current processes, using concepts such as WIP limits (to reduce multitasking) and classes of Service to deal with the variations in demand (the different types of work a software team usually does, such as new features, break-fixes, etc.) and make commitments to their product owners and other stakeholders based on their real capacity to deliver work.
In this process, Scrum teams may often move towards a 'sprint-less' delivery (just do releases on a regular cadence), while improving the frequency with which they deliver quality software. If they do so, many teams call that thenKanban process. However, that is not a necessary step at all. Team's can simply continue with Scrumban.
If you'd like to learn more about this, you can read up here - http://www.digite.com/Kanban-guide/what-is-scrumban
Hope this helps!
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Agile Scrum methodology does not use reports.
Do you agree with this statement?
Can Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog or Sprint Burn Down Charts be considered as reports?
The Scrum framework was designed from the start to be transparent.
There are three critical components to this:
A public task board (showing work in progress)
Sprint reviews (showing achieved progress and open to all stakeholders)A public product backlog (showing future work)
It is also worth noting that the Product Owner is the person most interested in this information as they own the product. They are involved every day with the team and so have a deep understanding of what is going on.
The issues that occur in Scrum reporting tend to happen due to flaws in the way the Scrum framework has been implemented. For example, if not all interested stakeholders are attending the sprint reviews then there can be misunderstandings. Also, if the Scrum Team is not allowed to be self-organising then there may be some concerns over communication with the technical managers.
Having said that, many teams use reports to supplement the Scrum transparency.
The two most common reports are:
A sprint summary (typically done by the Scrum Master)
A product update from the Product Owner
Mike Cohn talks about the sprint summary here.
Product updates have many formats. The most successful ones I have seen are clear and consise summaries of work in progress and planned work that are targetted at people of all levels of technical knowledge (including business users that are non-technical). I have worked with Product Owners that write visually attractive product updates that effectively market the Scrum Team to those that do not regularly attend sprint reviews.
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In my agile development course, after gathering user requirements, I'm asked to write a plan (for developing an application) that is supposed to define project activities, milestones - iterations and deliverables. The plan is actually the work breakdown.
So what should the initial plan in an agile project look like? If I'm giving a plan of everything in advance (as the homework asks), isn't that the waterfall model. If each iteration in agile deals with the whole cycle of plan-do-check-act, then why do we need an initial plan?
You need an initial plan because somehow you have to decide how many people are going to work on the project and develop a budget. You can never know what your scope, time, and budget are all going to be, but generally one of these is going to be fixed. Figure out which is the most important and build a plan around that. Without this as a starting point, nobody is going to fund the project.
Build a project backlog with all of the known goals. Then pull out the biggest of the goals as key milestones. Generally, a client needs to see progress towards their desired feature set. A smart client will be prepared to adjust these as the project goes, but you can absolutely lay out a series of goals to give you targets for creating working software with each sprint.
You should read Planning Extreme Programming by Kent Beck. If you ignore the extreme part of the title you can easly adapt this to your agile methods.
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Most Scrum teams have some sort of whiteboard or other board upon which the stories/tasks for the current sprint are visualized.
I'm curious as to how people organize this board? Do you use post-it notes? Are they color-coded? How do you group tasks? How do you distinguish the state of tasks? Etc...
I've seen groups use a whiteboard, and use different colors for each group of tasks.
If you use note cards for your stories, you can put them up there as well, and divide them by release/iteration/group of tasks. This concept is explained better here.
Update: I also use spreadsheets to visualize my sprints/iterations, because my team is not all co-located. I use tables and graphs similar to what was mentioned in Jim's answer.
Not for everyone, but for those running TFS, Scrum For Team System provides excellent sprint backlog reports.
Failing that, Ive personally maintained sprint backlogs using a spreadsheet, as per this article. Sharing via something along the lines of google docs.
Somewhere on the web there is a blog post which is just a lot of scrum boards. It is really good to see how other people do it. Maybe someone can find it for us :)
I think this looks like a pretty comprehensive way of doing things!
http://www.xpday.net/Xpday2007/session/AgileInGovernment.html
Check out the Rally tool at rallydev.com.
Depending on your needs, there is a free community edition. It's very easy to track stories and tasks within a given sprint, including estimations, actuals, and states for each story and task.
I usually use an Excel sheet, on a shared network folder: one column is used to specify the "group" of the task, and one to specify the task itself. For completed tasks, we simply mark the row in green. The primary disadvantage for that is sharing - I've yet to find a decent solution that allows more than one person to edit the backlog. We have some ways to deal with it (by limiting the updates to a specific time of day, and then having the team update it together), but it is still annoying.
For sprints with a small number of tasks, we simply write the tasks on a whiteboard, and strike over the tasks as they are completed.