Scrum Secret #2 - low tech rocks!
August 1, 2008
There are a number of elements to SCRUM that really work well for us. One of the most obvious features is our ‘SCRUM Wall’, where we ‘publish’ all the work items that form part of the current sprint to ‘The World’.
The Wall is primarily for the team, but it’s surprising how many ‘outsiders’ take a real interest. Initially there’s the comments about ‘nice wall - but a bit low-tech isn’t it’, to which we respond - ‘that’s the point’. The great thing about the Wall is that each card is a tangible thing, representing a tangible deliverable. Rather than being locked away in a spreadsheet or web app (though we do use TACKLE to track our tasks electronically to - more on that later) the cards can be accessed easily by everyone.
The cards typically begin life with a one-liner describing a deliverable, and estimate of how long it will take and the initials of one of the developers. However it doesn’t take long before the card has evolved with the scribblings of several members of the team as more information is discovered.
Quite often one card will become two or three as the iterative process of understanding more about the task unfolds. The pure simplicity of the wall means that things don’t get forgotten or fall off the radar - every thought and new discovery is captured quickly and easily.
The wall only represents 2 weeks of work at a time - a Sprint. This means that every 2 weeks the wall gets cleared. The completed tasks are archived. The items that are not complete or blocked are taken down and form the basis of the ‘Backlog’ for the next sprint, in addition to new scope items that we take from our ‘product Backlog’.
We are currently running a one-hour planning session with the whole team every 2 weeks, which gives us ample time to review where we are with the existing work items and allows us to estimate how much new scope we can bit off to keep us occupied for the next 2 weeks.
This process is incredibly tranparent and efficient. The constant replanning and course correction means that: we rarely build anything that is not part of the final solution; everyone on the team is cross skilled and across the big picture; we can easily slot in refactoring tasks to increase the robustness of components we have already built but need some ‘love’; reporting upwards to management on progress is easy due to the high visibility of the methodology (lets face it - who could miss our scrum wall!).
The best thing about this methodology is that the team is completely behind it. The core team members don’t want to work without it and new recruits accept and join in with the processes eagerly.
LONG LIVE SCRUM!
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Visibilty - you hit the nail on the head - especially to managers, who most of the time have no idea what developers really do or how big project tasks really are.
They often walk past our scrum wall and see what we are working on and what has been completed.
The “blocked” section is really good for nervous-pervous managers - when they see blocked items, they know they have to pull the finger out and perform some management action against another team, so that dev team velocity is not compromised by, for example, dependancy X from team Y not being ready yet.
Also the wall is great for highlighting how a seemingly “small” issue can be tracked in terms of complexity and dependancies - 1 “simple” card could actually require 5 -10 cards on the wall. This is much more visual that a project plan and helps mgmt with prioritisation and the relative worth of doing/not doing/prioritising a particular tesk
The other great thing about the cards is that at the end of your project, when mgmt asks “what do your team do?”, the scrum master can blow the manager away by handing him a big stack of scrum cards.
ps: love that statpro card