Ellie Powers on Scrum
- Posted: Jul 09, 2007 at 8:25 AM
- 20,440 Views
- 14 Comments
Scrum is the new, hot buzzword when it comes to process these days. Grace Francisco talks over lunch with Ellie Powers, Program Manager with the Hotmail team to find out more about Scrum and its benefits. Hear
her real world feedback on using it in projects and the challenges you may encounter.
Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=162705 to see another team that uses Scrum.
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Oh ye. Silly me.
I havent heard of her. Surely we should have an introduction video for her?
I agree about an intro video...
C
"During his team's daily Scrum meeting, the ScrumMaster looked at his fellow Pigs, analyzed his Burndown Graph, and spoke a few choice words about burdensome Chickens luring in the Project's wings - waiting for the chance to alter the Sprint Backlog, but in actuality will have to wait until the current iteration is completed."
See - pretty fun. Anyways, I hope I can apply its ideology to my future projects.
Geez... Thanks Charles!
Hi Chad! When Jeff gets back from sabbatical we'll do an updated team shoot of the evnet team so you'll get a chance to "meet" the entire team including me. I'm a PM on the team working with the devs on features across our communities. Thanks for watching my video with Ellie! You can also check out my blog entry on how we're doing with Scrum on the evnet team.
I haven't done a lot of study into Scrum but this video definately is going to get me looking at it more. I think it could really help my development shop which sometimes seems to have no meetings about projects.
Anyone have any resources on where to find out more? other than www.live.com
Agile Project Management with Scrum is a good book to read.
http://www.controlchaos.com/resources/
1) The analogy to a rugby scrum is unclear: In rugby, a scrum is a way of restarting the game, either after an accidental infringement or when the ball has gone out of play. The practice of Scrum in the software world includes regular short daily meetings where the team members all get together to communicate progress. Because of the similarity of pausing play (work), and having the players (team members) group together this meeting is commonly known as the Daily Scrum
2) I am not a big fan of electronic tools to manage agile projects. Core values of agile methodologies include communication, openness and honesty. Electronic tools to manage work and show progress hides this information from the team and stakeholders. If you use a project wall which uses index cards or post-it notes it is clear at a glance who is doing what. These tools may be helpful for teams not co-located. Teams not in the same vicinity can experience other issues e.g. communication.
3) On a similar point big visible charts on the wall to show velocity and burndown charts give very clear information to everyone in contrast to web based or excel based graphs.
4) It would be interesting to know what issues there were with the group of customers mentioned. There may be a scenario where different people in the customer team have different priorities, how is this situation resolved?
5) Having dealt with agile in various guises for over 4 years I think Ellie has already realised that agile methodologies may need to be tweaked to fit a team, organisation or project. Do not read this to mean take a few bits of say Extreme Programming and then say you are doing agile or xp.
6) Extreme Programming and Scrum fit together very nicely. There is no mention of any agile methodology to drive software engineering best practice e.g. TDD or Continuous integration. Scrum is an agile methodology for project management best practice whereas XP is agile best practice for writing software. This hybrid approach is very effective
7) There is no mention of how the work is broken down and estimated? I use user stories to break down work. I would recommend everyone reads Mike Cohn's book "User Stories Applied"
8) It appears estimating is done in hours. One developer's estimate is going to differ from another’s especially if they differ in experience. I use a method of estimating user stories (in story points) based on how complex they are using a small story as a yardstick. Estimating is also done as a team exercise (Planning Poker: www.planningpoker.com this is very cool!)
Ravi out!
It was a good talk as well, nice to know how otheres maniges milestones and such. I havent tryed Scrum for the small project that i have worked on we use Track.
Thanks for the book suggestion. I am going to hunt this out over the weekend.
I read the site provided by harumscarum (thanks to you as well!) and have been reading up on Scrum via the internets
I've tried applying some of the things I've read at work on a project I've inherited that is way WAY behind schedule (2 years). The team members are really going for it and we're making great progress. So big thanks to Channel9 for introducing me to the wonderful world of Scrum.
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