by Robert Dempsey on February 9, 2010
A goal, whether stated or not, on many software projects is to mitigate risk. There are many blog posts written on the subject, and I believe there is even software to help companies with this.
A fairly common way that companies try to mitigate risk is to plan everything in advance (big design up front) and then micromanage people so that they stay on track.
This could not be further from Agile principles and practices.
Agile teams are self-organizing, meaning they decide who is going to do what tasks within a given sprint. The team is 100% responsible for ensuring that they deliver what they agreed to. At the end of the sprint, we find out if they completed everything or not. If they did, everyone is happy and we plan the next sprint accordingly. If they don’t then we look at what went “wrong” and work to ensure that doesn’t happen in future sprints. Doing this over and over helps to mitigate risk.
What we do not do is impose more controls on the team, and assign task to individual team members.
If we revert to that, we are being counterproductive, and at the same time telling our people that we don’t trust them, and that we expect perfection. They might also think that we are trying to tell them how to do their jobs.
Will that help? Not that I’ve seen.
What is your experience?
by Robert Dempsey on February 8, 2010
I’d like to thank Mike Sutton and David Harvey for taking the time to speak with me about their experience with Agile tools and the issues they’ve found with the ones out there. We’ve taken their feedback to heart, and have started to implement a number of ideas they gave us. So a big shout out to Mike and David.
Today’s update brings a little more goodness to Scrum’d. Here’s what we’ve got.
Project RSS Feeds
Scrum’d tracks everything that goes on in a project, including the creation, updating, and removal of projects, releases, sprints, user stories, tasks, and more. Now you can see this flood of information for each of your projects by subscribing to it’s RSS feed. This is our initial go with RSS feeds for project, so we’re looking for your feedback to make it more useful. For now, drink from the firehose!
Simpler Security
During my discussion with Mike Sutton we discussed how much an application should enforce rules. Until today, Scrum’d would restrict who could do and see what based on your role in a project – ScrumMaster, Product Owner, Scrum Team, or Stakeholder. People not as familiar with Scrum and its guidelines were confused by this. So today we simplified it.
There are now two roles in a project – Project Admin and Stakeholder. So, you can either do everything (Project Admin) or only see everything (Stakeholder).
The reason for this is as follows: we don’t feel that an Agile tool should have to enforce the rules. It goes against Agile principles. If you have a product owner messing with your sprint then you all need to have a conversation. It isn’t the job of the tool to take the place of communication, a principle tenant of the Agile Manifesto.
Sprint Cleanup
Closed releases no longer show up in the release drop down when you are creating a new sprint. A minor update, but one of a series of tweeks we’re working on to make Scrum’d more usable.
More to Come
We have a long list of updates and new features planned for Scrum’d. This week’s sprint is going down the path of helping those that want to stick closer to “best practices” in Agile and Scrum including how to craft user stories and estimate them, and there’s something about bug tracking too. What are we adding? Well just sign up for Scrum’d today and you’ll see next week.
by Robert Dempsey on February 8, 2010
Atlantic Dominion Solutions and Scrum’d are proud to sponsor WordCamp Miami, being held on the University of Miami campus February 20, 2010. The more we get into the WordPress community the happier we are to be a part of it.
Come on down to Miami and meet fellow WordPress community members, an awesome speaker lineup, and if you see some guy sporting a bright red backpack and looks like he’s about to take off say hello.
