How We Apply Scrum to UE

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Making Scrum work with UE has been an interesting task. Scrum was not designed with UE in mind. We have been taking each Scrum concept and then trying to figure out how it applies to what we do.

For example, we had to think about backlog. What is our backlog? How do we track it in the daily Scrum? How do we decide what part of the backlog is in a Sprint and what part is left for the next Sprint?

In our first Sprint, we decided that our backlog is help topics. After all, that's what we do. We write help topics, and that is the business value we deliver. Our topics are created and managed in a tool called DocStudio. DocStudio defines all the states a topic goes through to be shipped, such as Not Started, Writing, Editing, Tech Review, Milestone-Ready, and Content Complete (this is not the complete list of states). DocStudio also has some limited query abilities which allow us to run daily reports on the status of topics. Therefore we can figure out what the status of the backlog is for each Scrum meeting.

So we defined our backlog and had a way of tracking it. We created a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to record the backlog status each day and build a cumulative flow diagram of our progress. Next, was how to determine what part of the backlog to tackle in the first sprint versus remaining sprints.

Our topics have a priority established as follows:

  • P0 - Ships in CTP
  • P1 - Ships in Beta
  • P2 - Ships in RTM
  • P3 - Post-RTM

And in our first Sprint we had P0 content to ship in the December Customer Technical Preview (CTP). We decided that our first sprint goal would be to build all P0 content. It turns out DocStudio has custom fields, so we used one of them to track priority. We marked topics as P0 - P3, and created queries to retrieve just P0 topics so we could monitor status on those topics daily. P0 was our Sprint 1 backlog. From there, we kicked off Sprint 1.

-davech