Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
We have a project which is going to last approximately 5 sprints.
The project involves a number of user stories, each story involving work by different developers: Web (AngularJS & ASP.NET MVC) and CRM (Dynamics). It is therefore 'Vertically Split'.
Each user story builds on the last: more fields being added to UI and more fields having to be picked up by CRM workflows. Testing each user story therefore requires re-visiting the user interface and back-end a number of times and testing the new fields just added.
Unusually, we have been asked to handle the sprint with 2 different types of task: the user story is put on one post it note, and the story has been further decomposed into the activities required by each developer (UI / CRM). As a result we are actually ending up with two burn downs: this is something which I don't understand considering that we haven't provided estimates for the individual tasks.
I understand that splitting user stories vertically means that you are always going to deliver something useful, but I can't help but think this is not always going to be the most efficient way of delivering the project, especially when you consider you're revisiting the same parts of the application again and again.
Is there any scenario where a horizontal splitting is acceptable in scrum agile, as in our case it would allow a CRM developer to implement their work in a separate user story? After all, if it's early on in the sprint, the risks of not implementing a feature in the developers respective layer is quite small. Furthermore, there wouldn't be a need to decompose the user story into further 'tasks'.
By decomposing tasks into horizontal (architectural) tasks in this case, we can make the UI changes in a few days and then get the CRM developer to pick up the data that we send across in a separate story. I think this would also make it far easier to test, because you are testing each complete 'feature' in it's respective environment rather than building it up across several user stories....
Obviously if you are a full stack developer it's a lot easier to achieve vertical splitting,. But it's not the case with this project....
What is the suggested approach where you have an application which is consistently increasing the number of fields / UI? Is horizontal splitting of tasks ever permitted in agile or is it always a no-no?
I'm not sure that even if you split the tasks horizontally you will achieve what you'd like. Let's take an extreme example where UI developer completes 100% of his tasks while CRM developer completes none of his.
Will there be any feature released (or any user story fulfilled)? I guess not.
Therefore, I would suggest to address the UI and CRM developers as one unit (with common burndown) and split the tasks internally between them.
Preferably, they will work in similar tempo so they can provide each other with tasks to complete.
Also, this cooperation can be a good thing as both UI and CRM developers will feel more commitment to the project since they have a common goal and measured as a common unit.
Hope it sounds reasonble and helps you to make a decision.
This is where the concept of swarming comes in. Assuming your scrum team consists of members with technical competencies that cover all aspects of the user story (e.g. UI, CRM, DB, etc), then your scrum team can swarm the first user story working together to complete all aspects at the same time. Assuming you have a tester embedded on your team, they can be writing test cases for it at the same time as well. In a day or two that story is done and you have something fully functional and demonstrable to your product owner/stakeholder. Then the team swarms the next user story. It takes time for a team to get into a rhythm to be able to do this effectively, about 6-12 months in my experience for a team without prior experience working this way to do so.
Also by doing the entire vertical path up front you learn what is needed early and can make changes quickly before there is a lot of code to refactor. If you do an entire layer first and then the next layer, besides not being able to test that first layer yet, you end up finding things when implementing the next layer that will cause you to have to go back and redo the first layer. This results in extra work or creates non-maintainable code as things are hacked in to meet deadlines.
Related
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
What types of tasks can be included and tracked as work items in the Sprint Backlog?
Can Analysis, Review and Unit Testing (of a user story) be included or can only core Coding tasks be included and tracked in the Sprint backlog?
Basically I am breaking down user stories into technical tasks to update the Sprint backlog and would like to know if tasks having non-coding roles can be updated and tracked in the sprint backlog.
You have these tasks that you want to track as work items. Be careful of doing this.
Why? You're starting to concretize a process. There's a slippery slope here. As soon as you start concretizing the process, you stop being actually Agile and start creating an inflexible waterfall of mandatory sequential steps.
If you think these things are so important that you have to write them down or the developers will forget them, then you're not giving your developers the responsibility to be agile, or the authority to make their own decisions.
You're treating them as untrustworthy.
Analysis of a user story. They're going to do this anyway. Why write it down? Will they forget? The point is understanding. Not documentation. Not time management.
Review of code. You want them to do this. You have to create the culture where this is done and the results are rewarding.
If the results of a code review are "your code sucks, do it again", then no one participates and it doesn't get done except by fiat.
If the results of a code review are "a new best practice for everyone to learn from" plus "perhaps you should rethink this according to other best practices", maybe people will participate.
Unit testing is part of a sprint without any question or discussion.
Indeed, it is -- perhaps -- the most important part of a sprint. Unit tests come first, before almost any other code. You don't need to say this. Indeed, the act of saying it makes a claim that your developers can't be trusted to test.
When you feel the urge to write down tasks for the programmers, then you have to also think through the question why.
Why do you have to write this down? What aren't they doing?
Here's the important part.
Why aren't they doing this in the first place?
Are they not analyzing? Why not? Are you making it hard to analyze? Are the users not making themselves available?
Are they not doing code reviews? Why not? What's the road block to code reviews? Not enough time? Not enough cooperation? Not enough reward? What's stopping them?
Are they not doing unit tests? Why not? What's the road block to testing? Not enough time? Not enough flexibility? Not enough positive feedback for doing tests first?
Why do you feel the need to "control" and "coerce" your developers? Why aren't they doing this on their own?
What tasks that can be included and tracked as work items in the Sprint Backlog?
As per Scrum Guide ->In the planning meeting part 2, the Team identifies tasks. These tasks are the detailed pieces of work needed to convert the Product Backlog into working software. Tasks should have decomposed so they can be done in less than one day. This task list is called the Sprint Backlog.
So whatever task which meets the above guideline needs to be included.
Can Analysis, Review and Unit Testing (of a user story) be included or can only core Coding tasks be included and tracked in the Sprint backlog?
Yes, they can and should be included if doing them leads to converting the Backlog to Working Software. Scrum NEVER suggests to include only coding tasks in a Sprint Backlog. In fact Scrum asks the team to be cross functional.
Basically I am breaking down user stories into technical tasks for updating the Sprint backlog and would like to know if tasks having non-coding roles can be updated and tracked in the sprint backlog.
This sounds suspicious to me. Is it just 'You' who breaks down tasks? It should be the whole Team breaking down tasks in the second part of the planning meeting. Again non coding tasks can be included in a Sprint.
Just to give you a realistic example: In my Web Development Team a typical Backlog had the following tasks.
1. Define and Discover
2. Design and Create Test Matrix
3. Write Unit Tests to Test Matrix
3. Code to make Unit Tests pass
4. Test
5. Regression Test
6. Debug
7. Go over 'Working Software with PO (if required to make sure this is what PO wants)
EDIT
One more point about tasking.
The tasks added during planning should constantly be broken down/updated/renamed when necessary. The whole point of this is to add a transparent set of decomposed pieces of things to do, which when done completely, eventually leads to working software following QA standards, most efficiently and effectively. These tasks should be picked up and worked on cross functionally and should not be blocked amongst team members.
Hope this helps!
The short answer is - whatever works best for your team and the user story in question.
For example, if we're working on refactoring a piece of code as part of a user story, we may break out a separate task to handle putting it under test first. But if it's new dev, we infer that it will be under test (and usually done with TDD) as part of our process.
Other examples include sometimes breaking out a separate task to cover time spent for coordination vs. coding, integration testing with external vendors, etc. - basically, any discreet and measurable task that helps make up that specific story (including some of the examples you have included above).
Bottom line is that there is not a set formula for what every story should have, rather tailor the tasks based on the individual needs of each story (even of those tasks are not code related).
If you create task for Analysis, Coding, Review, Testing, etc. in each user story you will get close to something called Scrumfall (each iteration divided to waterfall stages). It is one of the Scrum smells. Basically such activities should be included in single task: "Do something" means do everything you need to complete "something" = you are professional developer and you know (or it is said by policy) what has to be done to complete task.
That is general case. Sometimes you indeed need to divide tasks to "activities" but first you should start with common process and use this tool only if you have real reason - for example spike task in one iteration and real task in second iteration.
Edit: I used dividing tasks into activities once. We didn't do TDD but tests were written after completing the task. So each development task was paired with testing task to show that it could be done by another developer and sometimes in parallel with development. But the responsibility of testing by another developer was team decision and for complex tasks they really did that.
If you focus all the effort you are applying to task tracking to splitting your stories smaller (1-3 points) then you will working on becoming more agile. Small stories have almost no need for task level estimates or tracking. Your PO gets the benefit of being able to prioritize smaller sets of features and you get to focus on delivering value instead of documenting obvious steps repetitively. Certainly tracking a team's agreed upon standard practices by the hour per story is not at all useful.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
Is Agile/Scrum the answer? How does Scrum handle this?
One Product Owner, One PRoduct Backlog vs Multiple Product Owners and Product Backlogs?
How is it working for you? Please share your success failure stories?
I am trying to put a process together to manage multiple queues of work ranging from
Infrastructure projects, simple feature enhancements and then big projects with a
small development team of 6-7 developers.
One missing bit is whether this is technically one product (like one codebase, even if large) or not.
If those are completely separate products then using Scrum I'd go in very short sprints (1-2 wks) and sequence development work. So two weeks project A, then project B, then C, then again A - maybe for two sprints, then C etc. In such a situation a single backlog makes no sense, separate backlogs should be kept for A, B and C. I know at least one team that works like this.
Whether you need more POs is rather a function of knowledge about products. Maybe you need someone for each project, maybe you have someone who knows well enough A, B and C to be the PO.
If different products then when you try to do it by taking different stories from different backlogs every sprint what you will end up with is split team. Naturally people will specialize in given project, also it will be very hard to have a good definition of done (are we done if we can ship new increments for A and B but not C this sprint?). If you can't sequence projects with short sprints, then I would look towards Kanban for trying to put some organization into this.
If this is one product/one codebase - then things are much easier. Even if the team will have to touch different areas of the codebase because of different projects they will be still working on the same products so all mechanics of Scrum will apply nicely. One backlog, one PO.
One downside of this to be noted is that people on the team will context-switch and there is a penalty from doing this no matter what process you use. Whatever process you pick should try to minimize this as long as possible (as long as business will be able to hold). Nice thing about Scrum is that it has this built in agreement with the PO that context switches can occur only at sprints border - in other words team will get 1-2 wks to concentrate before having to switch to another project.
Also, don't forget about all technical practices of agile. Unit tests. Automatic builds & tests. Code reviews. Clever use of repos. High standards re. quality. All those are a must in such a challenging environment.
I guess you can do two things:
Do one release of one project, when done, do the next
Split up your development team
Or a combination of both :)
Agile/Scrum are nice buzzwords, but don't seem very related to your question.
Since they apply to the scope of a project, not to a bunch of projects.
I have experience with the second option, up to a level where there are more projects then developers, which isn't what you want. But with decent code review sessions it does seem to work.
A little more detail might help.
Is it one big production team, that is sharing lots of projects between them? Is it a small team (5 ish) with lots of projects?
Why do you have lots of projects? Are they working on different time frames, with some being the 'real work' and others being the 'if your not busy do this as a background task'.
I suppose the key here might be the project to developer ratio.
We have a single department of about 15, which runs 3-4 projects at any one time. People generally belong to a project at any one time, but can move between them as projects go through different phases, and as different skills are needed. Test in particular seem to switch projects a lot.
As for a strict process...make the process fit your needs. If we have a better idea of your needs we might be able to make better suggestions.
One critical piece is that the multiple product owners need to be aware of each other and be able to work together outside of the scope of the development. If they're segregated out into their own fiefdoms and each one trying to be louder than the others to get the attention "their product" deserves, then you're going to have problems.
By the time any development work is put before the team, these things should already be straightened out. The developers shouldn't care (or, in some cases, even bother to know) what tasks are for what owners or what projects, etc. They can care and know these things, sure, but it shouldn't be critical.
The product owners and various other high-level roles need to start each sprint with a plan of which stories should be done during that sprint. It doesn't matter how many stories from any given project are included, sorting that out is a scheduling concern for those stakeholders. Working with the architect or senior developer or such, they should simply decide what stories get implemented in the current/next sprint.
(On a side note, I have an Area 51 proposal for just this sort of thing: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/9543/development-methodologies)
IMHO, Scrum is more effective when you have at least 3 to 4 iterations of two weeks with a team of 4 to 6 developers. So for projects of +- 400 man/day
I think it's a bad idea to do multiple projects at a time.
Please also check this previously answered question:
How does Scrum work when you have multiple projects?
It's seems you mix product and project concepts.
I suggest to manage one product development with one team and one product backlog. Don't create separate projects for feature requests of one project. Instead have one team working on different requests from different customers by prioritizing the user stories.
Though, if those are completely separate products you develop, try to split up the team so each teams can concentrate on one product at a time.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
This thread is a follow up to my previous one. It's in fact 2 questions, so I hope no one minds, as they are dependent on each other.
We are starting a new project at work and we consider it as a great opportunity to try Agile techniques in action. We had a brainstorming about ideas we read in several books and articles, and came up with concept that would suit us the best: 2 weeks iteration, followed by call with clients who would choose what stuff they want to have in next iteration. I just have few more questions, which we couldn't figure out ourselves.
What to do in the first iteration?
What to, generally, do in the first few iterations if we start from the scratch? Just give it a month of development to code core of the application or start with simple wire-frames with limited pre-coded functionality? What usually clients want to see? Shiny stuff that doesn't work or ugly stuff that does work?
How to communicate with clients?
Our initial thought it to set the process to something like this:
alt text http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/2553/communication.png
Is it a good idea to have a Focal Point on client side or is it better to communicate straight with all the clients to prevent miscommunication?
Any thoughts are welcome! Thanks in advance.
In my opinion, a key success factor for agile development is to focus on delivering value for the customer in each iteration. I would definitely pick "ugly stuff that does work" over "shiny stuff that doesn't work". Doing shiny UIs and trying to get the client to understand hat business logic takes a lot of time to implement is always risky which Joel Spolsky has written a good article about.
If the client wants enhancements to the UI, they can always put that as a requirement for the next iteration.
Regarding communication with clients I think that your scetch should be slightly adjusted. Talking in scrum terms your "focal point" is called "product owner". Having one person coordinating with the clients is good, as it can take quite a lot of time to get the different stakeholders agree on the needs. However the product owner (or focal point) should be in direct contact with the developer, without going through the project manager. In fact, the product owner and the project manager has quite distinct roles that gain a lot by being split on two people.
The product owner is the stakeholders' voice to the development team. The project manager on the other hand is responsible for the wellbeing of the project team and often keeps track of budget etc. These roles sometimes has opposing agendas, and having them split on two people gives a healthy opportunity for negotiation between conflicting interests. If one person has both roles, that person often tend to favour one of them, automatically reducing the other one. You don't want to work on a team where the project manager always puts the client before the team's needs. On the other hand no customer wants a product owner that always puts the team's needs first, neglegting the customer. Splitting the responsibilities on two people helps to remedy that situation.
I'd agree with Anders answer. My one extra observation is that many clients find it impossible to ignoire the Ugly. They get concerned about presentation rather than function. Hence you may need to bite the bullet and do at least one "Nice" screen to show that you will pay attention to presentation details.
What to, generally, do in the first few iterations if we start from the scratch?
Many teams use an Iteration Zero to:
setup the development infrastructure (source control, development machines, the automated build, a continuous integration process, a testing environment, etc),
educated the customer and agree with him on the methodology,
create an initial list of features, identify the most important and do an initial estimation,
define time of meetings (planning meeting, demo, retrospective), choose the the iteration length.
Iteration Zero is very special because it doesn't deliver any functionality to the customer but focus on what is necessary to run the next iterations in an agile way. But subsequent iterations should start to deliver value to the customer.
Just give it a month of development to code core of the application or start with simple wire-frames with limited pre-coded functionality?
No, don't develop the core of your application during one month. Instead, start delivering vertical slice of the application (from the UI to the database) immediately, not horizontal slices. This doesn't mean that a screen has to be complete (e.g. implement only one search field in a search screen) but it should ideally be representative of the final look & feel (unless you agreed with the customer on an intermediate step). The important part is to build things that provide immediate value to the customer incrementally.
What usually clients want to see? Shiny stuff that doesn't work or ugly stuff that does work?
To my experience, they want to see demonstrable progresses and you want to get feedback as soon as possible.
Is it a good idea to have a Focal Point on client side or is it better to communicate straight with all the clients to prevent miscommunication?
You need one person to represent the clients (who is called the Product Owner in Scrum):
he provides a single authoritative voice
he has a perfect knowledge of the business (i.e. he can answer questions)
he knows how to maximize the ROI (i.e. how to prioritize functionalities)
Agile generally wants to provide the client something valuable, quickly.
So I certainly would not spend "month of development to code core of the application". To me, that smells of the "big up front design" anti-pattern. Also, see YAGNI.
Get as much information from the clients about what they need soonest, and implement that in your first iteration. "Valuable" is in the eye of the client. Thet will know if they want to see slick UI (maybe they want to give a slide show about the product at a trade show, so functionality can be fake) or simple working features (maybe you're developing something that they need to start using ASAP). Business Value is what they say will help them do their job.
I'd make my iterations as short as I can (your 2 weeks could work, I suggest considering 1 week) If you absolutely can't have your dev team and your clients co-located, instead of having a call with the clients, I suggest a meeting. Demo what you've done over the previous iteration and solicit feedback about what should stay, what should change, and what should be added.
As others have said, your "Focal point" sounds like a Product Owner. What worries me about your drawing is if it is meant to imply that devs don't interact with the PO or the clients. One thing that makes Agile work is when there is lots of communication. Having communication to/from the dev team always filtered through the Project Manager is almost certainly bound to result in miscommunication, unnecessary work, and missed details.
I agree with the two answers given but I would just add one thing from personal experience. Are your customers bought in to the change towards quick iterations? As well as providing feedback after each iteration which is going to require the customer performing usability tests on each feature.
Now I don't know what your groups relationship is with your customer but its not unusual for customers to take a "Put request in - get working system out" attitude in that they are enthusiastic when giving requirements but not so forthoming with time when it comes to testing the feature.
Now this may be totally inappropriate to your situation but its always worth considering how your customer workflow will have to change as well as your groups.
Cheers
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
Referring to this buddy question, I want to know how one can manage specs in Scrum process ? I'm facing this problem while assigning tasks to my team for the sprint. Needless to say - I'm new to Agile/Scrum.
Currently, we are using our own specs sheet to map StoryId to SpecId and vice versa. I'm getting the felling that Scrum is more about project management [getting things done on time] and you need a seperate process to manage specs and requirements.
How do we manage specs in a Scrum process ?
The short answer is, you don't.
The important question to ask yourself when writing these specs, is why do we do them? What is the value in the spec?
The value in the spec usually comes in communicating the ideas of the business with the development team. Scrum is designed to bring the business (in the form of the Product Owner) to the development team. By interacting with the team frequently (remember, individuals and interactions over processes and tools), and by seeing working software frequently, the business can work hand in hand with developers to produce software that solves business problems better than by trying to spec out the whole thing before you get to try it out.
This is how Agile projects do a better job of delivering the product the business wants instead of the product they requested.
That said, there are certain base criteria that need to be met. We can test for this, and as with any good tests, we can automate it.
Have a look at BDD and Cucumber. In addition to your User Story, it's good to have a basic set of conditions of satisfaction, preferably in the "Give/When/Then" format. These conditions are the minimum set of criteria for the story to be accepted as complete.
For example, "Given I am logged in, when I log out, then I am taken back to the home page".
If you're going to have acceptance criteria, you're going to want to automate it. The worst part of most specifications is they often end up out of date and collecting dust when the project is complete.
Also, you shouldn't be assigning tasks to the team. Scrum teams are self organizing and anyone should be able to grab any task they feel they can work on while respecting the priority of the stories. Swarming is a big part of the performance benefits of Scrum.
You may want to consider bringing in an outside coach to assist with your transition.
I think that the easiest way is to make the specifications a part of the user stories within the tasks, themselves. Clearly list the acceptance criteria in each one (or if your issue tracking software allows you, create them as first class work item types). Let the issue in whatever you use for work item tracking become the living document.
There are drawbacks, such as finding related issues as specs change over time, but this can usually be managed in the work item tracking tooling, assuming your can relate issues to each other.
The way that we do it is that we (actually a BA, not the developers) creates a sign-off deck for the product owner to review and we collaboratively create tasks off of that. If we cannot create a task, or there are open questions, we will go back to the product owner with those questions and update the deck. All of our decks are organized (in SharePoint) so that we can easily find them in the future.
For me the specs is in the user stories. We define the specs and the tasks duing out initial scrum meeting along with the product owner. The specs and tasks are just for the life time of the scrum iteration as everything might change in the next iteration(in the worst case but there will definitively be changes).
We usually keep track of the specifications and task on a spreadsheet just so that everybody know what they are working on. I have also tried a few software to do this and one of the most interesting ones I have come across is from [VersionOne][1] and also from [Rally][2].
But I still find that using a simple spreadsheet is the fastest and simplest solution.
As I understand SCRUM, it does not take care about specs management. You have to broke/map your specs or specs changes to stories and tasks separately. But you can have a task for this :).
There is a real tension between Scrum and other agile dev methodologies and spec writing. I think there are two big points of tension:
Because agile says everything should
be on an index card, that means you
have to have stuff planned out
enough to fit on an index card.
(E.g. you have to know how it's all
going to work.)
Some things don't make sense in
isolation (what's the use of an
upload file page without a manage
uploaded files page, for instance.)
You don't have to design the whole app all at once, but you have to have a vision of the whole app. Then, especially if you have a separation of designers and programmers, you do functional design for a sprint-sized chunk at a time. Those designs then have to be broken down to story-sized chunks.
This is a lot of up front functional design, and I think that's overlooked in a lot of the talk about agile methodologies. Perhaps some shops have the devs do more of the design. Also, I think it's a lot easier to use scrum/agile for making changes/bug fixes to existing apps rather than building new ones.
The thing I've found most helpful is to fight back on story size. A lot of organizations have gone crazy, saying stories need to be only a few hours. The original scrum book says 16 hours, I think, which is often large enough to fit an entire screen of a web app. So "implement manage my account" could be a story (as opposed to the hundreds-of-tiny-stories approach of "implement username", "implement password" etc.) Then reference your design doc for "Manage My Account" and make sure to have word-perfect screenshots/prototype/mockup so the dev can look at them and copy/paste the text directly into the code they're writing, and they know for sure which fields need to be there (or which links, or which pictures, or whatever).
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
We attempt to do agile development at my current job and we succeed for the most part. The main problem seems to be that the developers on the project are always waiting for requirements at the beginning of the sprint and rushing to get get things down by the end. The business analysts who are delivering the requirements are always working non-stop to get the requirements done.
EDIT: Additional Information:
We are customizing a COTS application for our internal use. Our 'user stories' just consist of what part of the application we will be customizing in the specific sprint and also what systems we will integrate with internally. The integration with different systems normally works pretty well because we can start working on that right away. The 'customize x screen' are the main problems areas because the developers can't do anything from that. We have to wait until we get the requirements from the BAs before we can really do anything.
EDIT: More insight/confusion perhaps:
I wonder if part of the problem is that the screen that are being customized are already there as this is a COTS product that is being heavily customized. People suggest that the user stories should be along the lines of 'make a screen that does X'. That's already done. Maybe there isn't a good way to do user stories for these requirements... maybe this need to be a whole new question.
Don't wait. Build a prototype based on whatever minimal requirements you do have and get feedback ASAP from the product owner. More often than not they don't know what they want anyway - if you can show them something tangible as a starting point you're more likely to get useful feedback. Also, once you have a better idea of the real requirements you will probably have already gained a lot of insight from developing your prototype.
If I understand your situation correctly, the BAs are the ones falling behind. There are two things you could try.
Try either small sprints or smaller requirement chunks. Either way the work for the BAs should be more concise and managable.
Take an interation to rework or bug squash. That should give the BAs sometime to get ahead of the curve.
If, however, the problem is that the BAs need to see the previous requirements in the "wild" before making more requirements you have much bigger issues. :)
At a previous position we managed this by asking our business customers to be a week ahead or so. Sure this breaks from some of the strict interpretations of agile but it made things so much easier. We would have both testing and the business working a week or 2 off from development so when developers were working on iteration 2 testing is working on what came out of IT1 and the business is on IT3. Priority was always given to active development so sometimes it broke down if a story was particularly flexible (i.e. the business had to spend lots of time revising things mid iteration) but overall it worked well.
Update to respond to the questioneers Update
It seems to me those don't really stand on their own as stories then and maybe the BA team needs to reevaluate how they are writing stories. I mean you can't reall "tell a tale" with customize X screen. In theory a story should be something like "When the user goes to screen X they should be able to modify (and save) the floozit"
Sounds like the BAs may not be handing you your user stories for the sprint in a timely manner.
I take it that there is no sprint planning sessions from what you say.
Given that one of the big tenets of Scrum is that the development team takes responsibility for what they will work on per sprint, it sounds like this ain't too agile to me! (-:
Apart from having short sprints that is.
Well, a couple of things might help
- In the SCRUM process, there is the concept of Product Owner wchich is a Pig Role, this represents the customer. So you can invite the PLM or the client's main contact to your SCRUM's meeting. This will give your customer's some buy-in into your process and will get them to work "with" you on your goals
- Weekly builds to the client might help. So, the basic idea of the weekly drops is to show the customer "progress". So if for a few weeks there is no progress, this should raise the question "why?" and then you should be able to explain that it is for the lack of requirements finalization.
Hope this helps
the "user story" is a placeholder for a future conversation, so get in front of the customer and ask them; if that's the BA's job, light a fire ;-)
Your user stories are incomplete. 'Customize X screen' is a task, it doesn't describe any requirements or completion criteria. The user story should be something like 'Allow Nancy to see the related purchase orders for an item in inventory'. Then break that down into tasks during your sprint that you can work on.
Once the BAs have developed a workable user story then add it to your product backlog, prioritize it, and plan your sprints for the top backlog items. The BAs should be developing user stories and adding to your backlog independent of your sprints, and thus not blocking you. During a sprint the tasks are completed and the user story does not change. After releasing the customer provides feedback which goes into the product backlog as more user stories.
I see a few ways to handle this:
Option 1, Under SCRUM, you should have a Product Owner who is managing your product backlog, which is supposed to contain requests for features of the software. If the feature consists of something vague like 'Customize screen X' and you decide to add that to your sprint, then the sprint tasks should be concrete, decomposed tasks, and I would say one of those tasks has to be 'Define requirements for screen X'.
During the daily SCRUM, when you're asking your three questions of each team member, the developer who has that screen mod task will say "I'm blocked waiting for requirements from the BA.", and your scrum master does what they can to get that moving along.
option 2, in my opinion, is that items do not go into your product backlog until they're defined well enough to do at least some productive work on. We all know requirements change, but the point is that you're supposed to have enough to start with.
Easy.
Allow yourself to think outside of Scrum's strict rules, and get back to your lean roots:
http://availagility.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/a-kanban-system-for-software-development/
http://leansoftwareengineering.com/2007/10/31/spreadsheet-example-for-a-small-kanban-team/
http://www.infoq.com/articles/hiranabe-lean-agile-kanban
Trust me, once you get that flow going, you'll never look back.
As it is said above, usually at the beginning of each sprint you should prioritize the existing backlog and pick some stories for the current sprint. If there is not enough user stories for the developers, you should shift developers to another project and let the product owner some time to create a decent (=large enough to feed some team) backlog for the project.