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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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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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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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We're trying to implement some agile/lean practices in our software development, and one thing I've read is not to maintain a long "wish list", but to keep the product backlog as short as possible with detailed notes only about the things near the top of the list. I can clearly understand the reasoning behind this.
However, often we will have a case where a customer of a tester finds an obscure problem or edge case. We usually do some investigation to find the exact source of the problem so we know how serious it might be (e.g. could it affect other cases?) and often consider how we would solve it and/or what workarounds are available. In some cases we don't go through with the actual fix because we think the cost/benefit isn't worth it at the time, but I still want to record the results of our investigations so that if the problem happens again in future, it's easy to recognize it and see what workarounds we used, and because we might decide that it's worth fixing it after all
At the moment we create a jira ticket with a special category called "wish list" for anything like this. Is there are more "agile" approach we should be using?
Be ruthless with your jira's, there is nothing to be gained by documenting every issue you find. Remember the agile manifesto - "Working software over documentation".
Fix the blockers right away, put the critical ones in the backlog and schedule in the next sprint, for anything that isn't worth fixing, do the investigation (always investigate bugs), write a few quick notes, and close it with the jira status 'wont fix'.
In Jira, or whatever tool you use, it is common Agile practice to close such a ticket with a closure reason of "rejected" or "answered". This will maintain the minimal documentation to prove that the issue was investigated but also communicate that the cost-benefit of pursuing the issue any further was not worth it. This backlogs then should be considered completed in any reporting roll-up and shouldn't distract the team during future backlog grooming or planning sessions.
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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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My current work involves working on a large number of bugs.
We normally (non TFS) would add these to an iteration backlog (grouped into Stories) after estimating and prioritising; then work through, mark actual effort.
I want to try and understand how I would work on these bugs using the TFS Agile template as intended. But am really struggling to find best practices and examples specifically for bugs for the TFS Agile template in TFS2010.
Cheers, Nick
I hear some parts in your question:
"Add these to an iteration backlog": you can use the iteration path of the work items. Best practice is to create an iteration called backlog.
"Grouped into Stories": In TFS 2010, the default traceablity is that on a User Story you define the Test Cases which validate the User Story. The Bugs are reported against the Test Cases.
"Estimating": You can use the Remaining work field for that
"Prioritsing": You can use the Stack Rank field
"Mark actual effort": Use the Completed work field
What we have been doing is:
Raising bug during testing by a tester.
During iteration planning we may decide to allocate X amount of time to fix outstanding bugs, so we creat a bug fixing story for that iteration of X story points.
Bugs are chosen that we think should be fixed within the iteration, a task is created for each bug along with a time estimate and any high level technical details. Note the task is created as a child of the story and also related to the bug.
The key is that bug work items are not developed against directly, a related task is.