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"Evidence-based scheduling" in FogBugz is interesting, but how do I use it w/ an Agile methodology?
As eed3si9n said, if you are consistent in your estimates for EBS, FogBugz will take care of this for you.
As to the more general, how does FogBugz fit with the Agile methodology, your best bet is to do sprints as mini-releases. Create a sprint and add the cases you want to achieve for that sprint to that release (or milestone). Give it an end date, say a week away, if you do week long sprints. Then EBS can track it and tell you if you are on schedule.
The graphs in the Reports section will also show you a burndown chart. The terminology is a bit different because FogBugz isn't Agile-only but the info is there.
You want to see if the expected time you are going to finish your sprint is staying steady or going forward. If it is steady you are on track and your burndown rate is on target. If it is creeping up, you are losing ground and your sprint is getting delayed. Time to move things to the next sprint or figure out why you messed up your estimates :)
Essentially I suppose this is a burn-up chart instead of a burndown chart, but it gives you the same answer to the same question. Am I going to finish on time? What do I have left to do?
Atalasoft's Lou Franco wrote an excellent post on this as well. Patrick Altman also has an article.
Update: fixed link to Altman's article
I asked the FogBugz guys the same thing because in XP for example you'd provide the estimate in IET (ideal engineering time). Their answer was to be consistent in the way you provide the estimate.
We started using FogBugz for pretty much everything within our technical team: Documentation, bug reporting, managing tasks. We have progressively got more Agile as time has gone on.
What I have done is created a release which is called the Product Backlog, and this is given an arbitrary release date in the future. I changed the FogBugz field "Version" to "Priority" so we can sort by priority. To manage the product backlog I heavily use Areas to categorise the user stories. Areas could be Themes or Epics. Each Iteration is a Release in FogBugz.
Now, one thing we have recently started using is Story Points as opposed to Ideal Task Days for estimating our Product Backlog. FogBugz doesn't understand a unit of measurement of Story Points so rather confusingly, 1 SP in our Product Backlog is reported as 1 Day in FogBugz. This could be dangerous if there is any confusion. But our team is small. I don't use the in built reporting tools in FogBugz, but it would be great if I could.
So, all my Story Point and Velocity calculations are done outside of FogBugz in Excel. This seems to be fine for now. We're tracking tasks using index cards for user stories and post-it notes as tasks on our boards in the office. Have a look at the book "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" book by Kniberg which influenced my decision. Actually having a big board with everything on it which we are staring at in our morning Scrums really helps.
I do think the historical estimation history and reporting in FogBugz is excellent. Does this work with the planning poker world? I suppose at least from a team's estimation history it does.
As User Stories in the Product Backlog often evolve as there are iterative planning sessions, (Agile Planning) it would be great if there was a wiki style editing of cases as opposed to a thread of descriptions.
There is talk that the next major version will be more supportive of Agile processes so am very much looking forward to seeing that this offers.
Edit:
FogBugz 7 is now out with much better management of Product "Project" Backlogs. Take a look!
http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/blog/post/Scrum-Friendly-Features.aspx
Here are some suggestions for including Story Points in your planning:
When you enter your Story into FB7 you can do it as a Case and include the number of Story Points from Planning Poker in a new custom field that you create called "Story Points" (how to do this below). Then, when you get around to working on that Story, you can break it down further into Sub-Cases, if necessary, and also enter the estimated time to complete each Sub-Case (the estimated times will add up in the Story (top) Case's "Estimate" field, as well as feed Evidence Based Scheduling / Burndown Charts)
Here are two things to consider modifying in your FogBugz installation to reflect your Agile nomenclature.
(1) Out of the box, the FB Category "Feature" is most like your "Story." But you can change your Category names, and add new ones at Admin > Workflow > Customize Categories. Here's additional information on this:
http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/docs/70/topics/plugins/CustomWorkflow.html?isl=174457
(2) To capture Story Points, you'll probably want to create a Custom Field in the Case dialogue. This is accomplished with the included Custom Fields Plugin. Additional information on this is available at isl=174461
Note that with Custom Fields, you can also add a text edit box for the Story which will always appear in the Case dialogue header (no matter how lengthy the case activity history below it gets.)
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During the past year, our organisation has began using Scrum. Over the past few Sprints it has become apparent that our Scrum isn't really working - we have difficulties with dependencies of certain tasks, and we are way off on our burn down charts.
Historically, we'd never paid any attention to our velocity and complexity of products, and everything was pretty much a guess.
We are nearing the end of our first Sprint on our new project. I have been working over the past couple of days of ensuring that we have a prioritized, complexity estimated product backlog. I retrospectively added the user stories that we are working on in the first sprint. It's quite apparent that we have bitten off more than we can chew.
We estimated our team velocity to be 28 story points, however, we haven't actually finished any of the user stories. Is our team velocity actually zero, and if so, how do I begin trying to plan the next sprint? Do we need to re-estimate our team velocity going into Sprint 2? Or can we take a best guess of what our velocity actually is given the percentage of the user stories we've actually completed?
Another issue we have is that our team is split into three tiers - Data, UI, and Services. This can make Sprints difficult to plan because of the different skill sets. For example, we have a very large user story which involved importing data from our legacy system (almost a whole sprints worth), but only our Data guys are able to work on this story, so we need to add additional stories which will allow the UI and Services team to also be involved in the sprint. We are then stretching ourselves even further.
Not many people on the team understand Scrum that well. I did a Scrum master course about 4 years ago, and I've forgotten a lot of what I'd learned, and I'm really struggling to get this Scrum team working well.
We have a scrum team of 14. Is this too big, should we try and have two smaller scrum teams? We are all working on the same project.
I'd be very appreciative of some advice from seasoned Scrum Masters on what we can do to try and help our Scrum process.
It sounds like the retrospective for this sprint will be interesting! These are some of the things that I might try and encourage the team to focus on in the retrospective:
Your velocity is unfortunately 0 because no stories are Done. I would encourage the team to consider:
What went wrong with the unfinished stories? What stopped them getting to Done?
Were the stories too large or complex? If so, how could they have been broken down? Beware splitting the stories into "layers" - stories should be split into vertical slices so each story still delivers an increment of user value.
Did the team start too much and not focus on finishing what had already been started (too much work in progress)?
You might need to remind them that the team as a whole succeeds or fails - if one part of the team struggled it was up to the rest of the team to support them and come up with a solution.
As discussed above, stories should be vertical slices of functionality, not horizontal ones. This is tricky because software engineers often think in "layers". How can you overcome this with the "tiered" team? In particular, how can you avoid hand-offs between the three groups (hand-offs are expensive and cause delays). Some thoughts:
Could the Data team have provided a stub (e.g. an interface that returns hard-coded dummy data) to allow the UI and Services teams to proceed while the data layer is being completed?
Could a cross-functional group have swarmed on each story (so all three "tiers" are forced to work together on completion of a story)?
How can the tiers cross-train so they can take on work outside their specialist areas (this is the concept of "generalising specialists" or "specialising generalists"). This will allow them to support each other when the going gets sticky.
Is the scrum team too large (probably)?
A "two pizza" team of 5-9 members is ideal
Would it be possible to split the team into two scrums with people from all three tiers in each scrum?
Each scrum can work independently on an epic
Outside the retrospective, the scrum master and product owner might want to think about a couple of things:
Backlog management is really important (and really hard to get right) - it sounds like you have done lots of work on this, but it is vital to keep it up. A poorly groomed backlog will stall the team.
If you have silos (e.g. between the "tiers"), you need to work to break them down. Silos reduce the team's flexibility and create hand-offs which are expensive.
Finally, "Succeeding with Agile" by Mike Cohn is a really great book which covers the practical side of making scrum work in the real world. I found it extremely useful.
Bids has given good advice and what I consider the answer to the headline question but it is buried in there. I wanted to explicitly call it out:
Would it be possible to split the team into two scrums with people from all three tiers in each scrum?
In Scrum stories are intended to be vertical slices through the system. You should restructure your teams so that they have the expertise to develop the end-to-end features. This will make a huge difference and I would try this before doing any other tweaks.
Not finishing any stories is pretty bad. You should limit the amount of work in progress.
I would recommend that you give the team only one story and make them work together on it. They're obviously a brand new team, that need to learn to walk before they run.
Would this be wasteful by not fully utilizing team members? Maybe, but the team haven't proven they can actually deliver anything. At least delivering one thing would prove a certain level of productivity and it would force them to actually work as a team.
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I recently interviewed with a company which has started introducing Scrum for their development cycles. I asked one of the developers how their experience has been, and it sounds like they are completely divested from the planning process. He wasn't allowed any input as to what went into a given Sprint, and didn't participate in any planning or grooming activities.
Basically, at the start of the last Sprint (or two) he was handed a to-do list. He had to breakdown items into their respective tasks (so they could be worked on over the Sprint), but wasn't involved in any planning activities; I'm skeptical he was allowed much input into how much effort an item might take -- I suspect the architects decided this for the team.
Is this how Scrum should be handled? My current team fully participates in all planning activities, continually adding our input as to how features may be addressed and how much effort they might take. I'm a bit skeptical (and nervous) about a company which simply hands developers a to-do list without asking for their input.
Note: I understand that once a Sprint starts, the list really is a prioritized to-do list. My concern is not having input into the planning process from the start.
If those who are doing the work don't get to give input saying what amount of work can fit into a sprint and let the business decide whats most important and should be scheduled to fit. Its not going to work run away. They are using new trendy agile words but doing the same old things.
(...) He wasn't allowed any input as to what went into a given Sprint, and didn't participate in any planning or grooming activities.
Obviously, they're still doing command and control and micro-management (the team is not empowered and self-organizing) and they are still using push-based scheduling (they didn't enable pull-scheduling).
Scrum has other characteristics but the above points are more than enough to say that they aren't doing Scrum, regardless of how they name it, they didn't really shift from the outdated waterfall approach (they just did put some lipstick on the pig).
This is a big hint that they're still totally clueless about what Scrum is about, they didn't get it at all. And this is not going to change without some inspection and adaptation, if they even want to change. If you don't have the power to make this happen, run away.
Is this how Scrum should be handled?
No.
I worked at a place that called themselves agile. They had 6-8 month release cycles. Some things came from a backlog, but during the "Requirements Gathering" phase, basically the managers would spend a week or two meeting with various people in the company, and write up a feature list. The first day of each 4 week "iteration", the dev team would all get together and break down everything in a series of meetings. The last day of the iteration was deployment day, where there would be an intrim deployment that nobody outside of the dev team ever saw.
During the 8 month release cycle, the managers would touch base with the stakeholders maybe once or twice in the last two months of the release, at which point the only issues raised in those meetings that had a chance in hell of getting done before release were issues that were bad enough to make the whole effort useless if they were not implemented.
This is not agile, this is a variant on waterfall with a poor choice of ideas and methodologies cherry picked from other methodologies. At the end of the day, it still has all the same problems that waterfall does.
The lesson I took from my employment there is that development methodologies include things for a reason. If you are cherry picking from a methodology without fully understanding it (and by fully understanding, I mean having actually worked with it), there is a high chance that you will not use something that is actually vitally important to the whole thing. For example, in xp, kent beck advocates relying on refactoring later as a way to cut down on up front design. However, the only reason this actually works is that he also advocates TDD and pair programming. If you have a comprehensive test suite and an extra set of eyes there for the whole thing, refactoring is fairly safe. If you just cherry pick the first part and leave those two out, you are essentially cowboy coding.
I am extremely skeptical of shoppes that roll their own methodologies for this reason. There are an absolutely shocking amount of crimes being committed in the name of agile.
Is this how Scrum should be handled?
Definitely not. Scrum strives to increase transparency. By blocking developers from planning activities, they are doing the opposite of what scrum suggests.
You talked about 2 points here:
1. Sprint Planning - The Scrum Team members should be Definitely required here.
2. Backlog Grooming - May or may not be required here. You have to use your resources wisely and with common sense. One team member with strong developer background would be okay here I think.
There is one more type in Scrum:
Release Planning - Some might say developers are not needed here. But as per the Scrum Guide - "Release planning requires estimating and prioritizing the Product Backlog for the Release". Well prioritization can be done by the POs and suggested by the stake holders, but estimating would be most accurate if it is done by someone who is actually going to do the work, so it is a good idea to involve developers here. Again, resources should be used wisely. If it makes sense to not involve all developers and have people rotate turns to estimate, that is not a bad idea.
I suggest follow this structure:
Sprint Planning - part 1 : Estimation and pulling backlogs in Sprint from product backlog (PO, SM and Team are pigs here)
Sprint Planning - part 2 : Tasking, estimating task hours and breaking them down. (SM, and Team are pigs, PO is chicken here unless PO is taking tasks as well)
It is up to the team to figure out, during the sprint planning meeting, how it will turn the selected product backlog into a shippable product functionality. If they are not part of this process then they would not be able to commit.
The answer to your title question is: Developers (team) must participate in planning meetings. Planning meetings are for developers (team).
The good approach is to have two planning meetings at the beginning of each sprint: Planning meeting 1 and Planning meeting 2. In Planning meeting 1 Product owner gives prioritized (and size estimated - size estimation is not done on planning meeting) product backlog to the team and team starts to discuss most prioritized user stories. For each disucssed user story team should be able to collect:
Detailed requirements (for example which fields the input form has to have ...)
Constraints (for example how fast the functionality has to be)
Acceptance tests (verification of results)
UI sketches (for example how should UI flow looks like)
Acceptance criteria (validation from end user - acceptance criteria doesn't have to be real test. It can be something related to "easy to use" etc.)
There should be time boundary for Planning meeting 1. Number of user stories you were able to discuss can correspond to number of user stories you will be able to complete in upcoming sprint. At the end of Planning meeting 1 team must make commitment - say how many of discussed user stories will be done in upcomming sprint. Sprint planning meeting 2 is only for team because team further discusses user stories and breaks them into tasks.
Generally, of course they should. Obviously, it's never realistically possible to the degree that developers would like. However, if sprints are usually "Hair On Fire" type affairs, where the developers get no serious input at all... then at the very LEAST there should be regularly-scheduled "entropy reduction" sprints, where all tasks are selected exclusively by the developers for the purpose of cleaning crap up.
At least some developers need to be there so work can be properly estimated and pipelined.
But not all developers need to be there. All can be there is it makes more sense.
On the other hand, developers need to understand that the business priorities are the priorities, no matter what they think should come next. Everyone has to work together ot make it work.
I'm not so much worried about my input, but about my insight. I recently was involved in a project where I had no knowledge of the project before the plans were handed to me supposedly complete. The nightmare started when I discovered that the process was not completely thought out and the data definitions were not complete. I wound up having to go through the whole process again to get the answers that I required.
The Team can be involved in the planning process without a formal process or meeting. The planning process is really very fluid. At the start, the goal should be to get to starting sprints ASAP. Spending too much time in planning before the first sprint feels very waterfall and is a waste of everyone's time. I, as a team member would feel relieved to not be a part of that, except for the fact that it indicates a dysfunctional nature to the organization. The Team should always be free to voice ideas on an ongoing basis (since that's when the real planning happens). But, 2 things you mentioned concern me most.
First, the Team should be the only ones to determine how many backlog items they can do this sprint. They certainly would be involved in estimating the effort. That's a big problem.
Second, the Team does not sound like they have access to the product owner (maybe there ins't even one here). Even if the team has not been involved in the "planning" thus far, surely if I were talking to the product owner in the planning meeting, or had access to them at other times, I would voice suggestions over time.
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We are in the process of developing an new product and implementing Agile, specifically Scrum. Our first sprint was planned conservatively, but we are going to miss our target by quite a bit. The main cause being interuptions and new clients throwing in last minute requirements that we had stop and react to.
To be able to help identify our weaknesses and also so I can get some fodder together for a retrospective of our first sprint, I am interested in hearing about companies developer head count versus user head count. Is your ratio/mix a successful one? Only for internal development, not software houses or tech companies. Any opinions on the subject are also welcomed, I think it could open an interesting discussion.
The main limiting factor is always budget, so there is no need to include that in any opinions.
Don't be too upset with failing your first sprint. It is rare to do anything 100% the first time. Most first sprints reveal problems that have to be fixed - just as it was in your case.
Your problem has nothing to do with the users / developers ratio. Your problem is properly insulating your sprints and making sure the basic Scrum deal (no scope changes mid-sprint, all scope changes between sprints) is adhered to. Things to do:
Make sure everyone understands Sprint Backlog can't be changed between Sprint Planning and Sprint Review. If anyone tries to force this play by the book: do abnormal termination, throw away all the work work, plan a new sprint and make all of the fuss about it. The reason Scrum calls for this is to make the cost of interruptions and scope changes highly, painfully visible.
Shorten your sprints. Two week sprints worked very well for us because it was pretty easy to explain to any manager type that he can wait 2-3 weeks for his feature. Our PO got pretty good at this eventually.
If for any reason you have short fixes / features that can't wait two weeks institute a "firefighter" - devote one developer per sprint to handling such issues, don't plan any regular work for him. To avoid burnout make it a rotating function - someone is the firefighter each sprint. Hey, you could even buy them a firefighter hat. :)
We did 1 & 2 after our first sprint (way back in 2007) blew just like yours. It helped a lot, so we didn't have to do 3. I advised 3 to a team that had such need and it worked pretty well.
If you allow new requirements during a sprint for this sprint, you're not doing scrum.
The only thing I would allow, are critical bugs in producitve software. These have to be fixed. Here one would allocate one or two devs per sprint who are responsible for bugfixing, if the need arises.
Too many users is not (should not be) a problem. The developer to user ratio depends on the type of the product and the industry/domain, not on the methodology. Small shrinkwrap products (developed by a minimal team, or even a single person) can have millions of users (e.g. Total Commander), while huge internal enterprise products developed by a team of hundreds can have half a dozen users.
The problem is rather that apparently your users are not familiar with Scrum, and you are not using a single product backlog (or haven't taught your users about it).
You should have a single product owner, who decides about what gets into the next sprint, at the start of the sprint. Last minute change requests are (ideally) not allowed - they can only get into the next sprint. It is the product owner's responsibility to communicate with the users, collect and evaluate feature ideas/requests, prioritize them, and OTOH communicate these towards the dev team. In other words, users should never ask features directly from individual developers; they should turn to the product owner instead.
The essence of scrum sprints is that you can't interrupt them with last minute requirements.
Regarding the ratio you are talking about, it depends greatly on what your product is, in which industry you are, and lot of things like that. So to make this value useful, you will have to experiment a bit.
But your developers should rely on your product owner, and not your user base (regardless its size).
Sprint is safe zone. At the beginning of the sprint team discusses product backlog items with product owner and selects subset of these items to be done in upcomming sprint. Team commits to these items. It is team responsibility to deliver commited items so no one can introduce new items during the sprint except the team (this usually happens when items are developed faster than was expected).
Each SCRUM project has to have one Product owner (if there is more than one, there has to be hiearchy) which is responsible for product backlog. If the product owner demands new items during sprint the only way to do it is to cancel current sprint and start the new one.
Possibly a more meaningful ratio would be developers : features/projects. If a manager commits all available resources to a sprint, then there is a higher probability that you'll need to interrupt at least one of them for a critical support issue (for instance); it's a slippery slope to things like "well, you're ahead of schedule, so can you slip this extra functionality in", at which point you've broken one of the core principles behind SCRUM.
I get the feeling you're about to start a campaign for more headcount in your department, to relieve pressures on the current team; perhaps a better long term approach would be to manage expectations of your customers (be they internal or external), so that your existing headcount remains flexible to jump in and handle interruptions; at the same time they can manage expectations that additional requirements get deferred to a later sprint.
developer head count versus user head count
I'll probably get downvoted for that but I think it is largely irrelevant.
There are fantastic products built by a couple of guys serving millions of users.
Just as there are projects developed by a huge strike force which never crossed the threshold of mediocrity.
User head count / dev head count is not a relevant metric.
You can have a single user that generates huge amounts of change versus hundreds that don't generate any (of very little) change.
What is relevant is the amount of change being requested and how it is managed and tracked.
If you can show how much the requirements have changed while still implementing and designing for other requirements you will have your fodder.
One of the biggest mis-conceptions about any Agile methodology is that you can make it up as you go along.
And although this generally true, the key thing is project management and communication.
Like a lot of things in life you can do anything, but there is a consequence. If I buy a Ferrari can I afford to eat?
If I ask for an extra bit of functionality how much is that going to affect the project.
So during planning
MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could or Wont) requirements
Estimate how long it will take
You cannot fill a Sprint / Timebox with Musts or Shoulds
During the sprint / timebox
Monitor the time it takes against Estimates
Re-plan
When an interruption occurs. Log it and feed this into the Time Taken requirement. Next set of estimates include and interruption factor. Estimation within Agile is an Artform!
When changes are asked for
Estimate how long it will take, compare with original estimate
Inform the Business User of the effect
Prioritise within the MoSCoW
Communication is important. If you want me to add that button there, I will not be able to print the invoice.
Because of MoSCoW it maybe that in sprint 4 the item which is a Wont might make it's way up to a Should or a Must.
Also treat Agile as a toolkit you do not need to prescribe to SCRUM or any other methodology pick the important bits which work for the culture you are in.
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Given that the tasks in a specific sprint will not divide perfectly into the team, and all finish on the same date, what do you do to keep everyone working as the sprint moves into its final stages?
Inevitably it seems like there will be one or two people freed-up. If all the other tasks are done-done, and the remaining tasks are already underway, then what?
Do those team-members pick up items from the top of the product backlog, as they are likely to be needed in the next sprint anyways to get a head start?
What do you or your teams do?
My teams have always picked items up from the backlog, starting with the highest-priority items that can fit in the remaining time.
If nothing quite fits that criteria (as when there's only half a day left and/or no small stories to pick up), consider paying down some technical debt.
Scrum is done by teams.
If some people are done, they can help other members of their team.
They can also help their team by getting a head start on the next sprint.
They can also do some exploration of new technology, if that would help the team.
Or they could brush up their own skills, if that would help the team.
They could create training materials to help other members of the team improve their skills.
That's a team decision.
Pay down Technical Debt
Do anything that the team thinks should be done but doesn't belong on a card because there's no visible business value. Some people have called these tasks "technical stories". They tend to be things you should have done before Sprint 0, but didn't. Examples include adding of these that you don't already have to the build:
a Continous Integration server
a test coverage tool
static analysis tools
One thing I recommend is looking up future tasks and doing some detailed planning for estimates. This is non trivial and will take some time. Another is to scope of a new large scale project that can be broken into tasks and entered in product backlog.
Refactoring, writing unit-tests, improvement skills.
(...) what do you do to keep everyone working as the sprint moves into its final stages?
Nothing, I expect a self-organized team to find out this by themselves. And there are many options (by order of importance):
Help other members of the team to finish their stories (achieving the goal of the sprint is the most important, the whole team succeed or fail at this, not individuals).
Prepare a kick-ass demo.
Pick up a story from the backlog that can be done-done before the end of the sprint (i.e. not always the next highest priority items but something that fit in terms of size).
Repay technical debt if you have some.
Document things if this make sense.
Explore new things (tools, frameworks, testing techniques, etc) that may be useful for the team.
While it may seem obvious for team members to move on to the next highest items in the product backlog, I would advise against starting with this.
First and foremost, the teams' obligation is to achieving the sprint goal, so anything they can do to work towards that must come first (e.g. helping out testing, chipping in where possible, etc.).
Next, the team should look at expanding their definition of "done". Perhaps it currently doesn't include testing, or doesn't include some form of code review. Most teams starting with Scrum do not start with a definition of done that truly has a product increment that is ready to ship, so now would be the team to move towards that.
As others have mentioned, what tools do you need setup in order to get closer to a shippable state? Continuous integration? Automated acceptance tests? Now is the time to add these things.
Likely, you also have areas of the code that existed before you moved to Scrum and thus don't have very good test coverage or have accumulated technical debt. Now's the time to pay that off.
Also, as Mike Cohn suggests in his book Succeeding with Agile teams may want to reserve roughly 10% of their time for some look ahead planning. This may involve having a meeting with the Product Owner to discuss some up and coming stories for future sprints, breaking down larger stories into smaller ones, or for designers, perhaps doing some wire frames or mock-ups for upcoming stories.
Once you've gotten to this state, only then should you consider continuing on with the product backlog.
When there are team members that have completed there task early and find themselfs unoccupied there are a few things that can be done.
Make sure that estimation can be improved so hence planning can be improved. In doing this, bare in mind this estimation is very subjective. (However in my view underestimation is a situation we do not want to be in).
The scrum master has to bring in an ethos to the team of "Forwarding thinking"; improvements in oneself, in team productivity and the product or business the team is working on.
2.1. Try help out other team members task where possible to get stories Done (DOD) in the the sprint.
This could be pair work (pair programming)
As a programmer fixing other peoples bugs
etc etc
2.2. Try to help the scrum-master with other stories in he backlog. Check if any small story can be completed within the capacity of sprint making sure of it Impact to the sprint.
2.3. Work on research where there is a story in the backlog which is unclear. Do research on this story. Here a new story can be created with the emphasis on delivering research results. This story should be 0 points. programming prototyping etc can be done on the developers local PC without it being checked in.
2.4. Develop ones own skill either in there functional area (programming, testing etc) or the domain area.
The idea is a team that is performing. Each team member is dedicated to the goals of the team. So if you find yourself free...forward think how can i help the goals of the team.
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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.