SCRUM Notes

Stakeholders are divided into Pigs and Chickens.    Imagine pigs and chickens have opened a breakfast place together selling eggs and bacon.    The pigs have a much bigger stake in the process.    Programmers and Designers are pigs.   C-Level, Management, Product Owners, Marketing People, and Users are chickens.   

Team Players

1.        Product Owner  (the Single Neck To Ring) – In charge of releasing product in timelines, maintaining product features and product quality .

2.       SCRUMmaster – Responsible for protecting team from outside distractions and removing blockages, limitations.

3.       Team – Programmers

Process

1.        Prioritize Product Backlog

a.       At this point, new features are just stories about what the users want in the application.  Not technical at all.

b.      What? (instead of How?)

c.       Chickens and Pigs Speak

2.       Decompose Project Backlog into a Sprint Backlog

a.       Team member volunteer for the task.

b.      How? (instead of What?)

c.       This is where the programmer breaks down the hours of individual elements of the project into sprints.

d.      If a sprint is more than 16 hours, it needs to be decomposed more.

e.      The sprint hours cannot be negotiated down by the Product Owner and the SCRUMmaster needs to make sure this doesn’t happen.

f.        The results of a sprint must be tangible, experiencable.   “Fixed a bug” is not a sprint.  You want something demo-able, shippable.

3.       Little Meeting (Daily, 15 min)

a.       Only Pigs Speak

b.      Each pig stands up to speak.

c.       3 questions

                                                               i.      What have you done yesterday?

                                                             ii.      What are you doing tomorrow?

                                                            iii.      What is blocking you?

d.      Can’t phone in for Little Meeting, must be present.

4.       Burn Down Chart – result of Little Meeting

a.       Open in transparent tool (Advanced Warning Mechanism)

b.      Regular application of Risk Management Principals.

5.       ½ Day Meeting – Recap of project and process

a.       What went right and wrong with the project

b.      Feedback, Improvements