Continued progress on our first sprint

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Yesterday was an interesting day.  It was day 9 of our first sprint (named "sprint 2" to synch with the milestone numbering we'd been using).  First we had a short review of our status (not an official sprint review, just a brief "state of the project" mtg), and our management is very receptive to Scrum.  They seemed to really like the idea of a backlog that contained the full list of features.  I grimaced at the fact that one pet feature seems to be getting pushed up higher than I think is prudent, but such is the prerogative of mgmt and the Product Owner.

Second, we had an interesting development after our daily scrum meeting yesterday.  After the meeting a chicken (who, as one of our PM's, is a legitimate stakeholder) had a process question, and the team decided to stay & listen.  This person was expressing concern over the fact that we had one person's items stay flat for a day, and was worried that this would be viewed negatively by upper management.  In retrospect, I probably made a ScrumMaster mistake by allowing this question to impact the team, because now the team was having to think about the prospect of our PUM looking through our sprint backlog and asking questions about daily-level deltas.  In reality, that's something that we wanted to insulate the team from by using Scrum.

It was, however, a valid concern.  What do you do if a day goes by and someone has made progress yet they now find that they still have the same amount of work remaining because new work was discovered?  This can happen due to two reasons: 1) someone's not working, or (more likely) 2) they have discovered new complications.  Now, #2 is very common during coding, but with daily inspection I guess it just becomes much more visible -- normally you would simply hit the expected end date for coding and report that you have N more days left -- a slip of N days is easier to understand than going a day and seeing no change in the days remaining.

Action items for me:

  • I'm going to be more diligent about insulating the team from questions & pressures like this
  • Maybe I'll ping the ScrumDevelopment list to see what advice they have

So far, I'm very happy with Scrum and I hope that is use will continue to expand within our team.

Take care,

Chris