Pondering next steps

Hi all -

  With sprint 5 done, we are now in a quiet period, as we have balanced most of the resources on our project toward helping Whidbey get finished.  We will probably pull some resources back soon, however.

  I have been thinking about how to get the part of our team that isn't using Scrum onto the Scrum model.  It's hard, because this other part of the team is working in a reactive mode, fixing newly found bugs and other last-minute issues that arise.  This kind of thing is hard to model in a sprint backlog in any way other than sets of buffers.  So, I'm not sure what to do.  Maybe we will just wait until there's some "ordinary" work (that is, work that means forward progress on new capabilities) to be done, and include some of these reactive tasks via a buffer.

  Our entire feature team is too big to fit into one Scrum team, but would split up into two nicely-sized ones.  So I'm also thinking about how best to deal with this.  As far as scheduling, maybe we will stagger the teams off by two weeks so we don't have sprint endings and the associated planning meetings happening during the same time periods (yikes!).  Another issue is ensuring cross-team communication; we still want to operate as one feature team even though there is a split (but related) focus.  Maybe we'll have to follow the advice I read somewhere (Schwaber's book?) to have 1-2 pigs always visit the other team meetings as chickens and report back.

  If anyone has suggestions on dealing with two Scrum teams within a single conceptual "feature team", I'd be interested in hearing them.

Signing out!

Chris