First Scrum sprint complete!
Dear Readers -
I'm happy to report that our first Scrum sprint has completed, and it seems to have gone quite well. We had a clear plan of what to do, delivered on the sprint goal (with one caveat), and have done our planning for the next sprint. I really like the flow of Scrum. Having a postmortem (called a "sprint retrospective" in scrum lingo) was very useful and we directly fed the results of that back into our planning and processes for the next sprint. We don't take enough time to do that outside of Scrum, so I thought that was great.
One disappointment is that none of our upper managers showed up -- in fact, the ones who have been applying the most pressure on us were no-shows, which was a bummer. (One other manager planned to come but had a sick kid, which is a valid excuse.) But otherwise I really like using Scrum, and much as I felt about test-driven development, once you've used Scrum you don't want to go back to more traditional project management processes.
We're going to continue to use Scrum internally for this project, and I'm going to turn the ScrumMaster reins over to another team member once the sprint is underway. That will free up some of my time to possibly use Scrum for the other part of my team -- we'll see.
Overall, Scrum has been pretty well received by managers and other interested stakeholders. You can't really argue with monthly updates and opportunities to provide feedback, as well as (most importantly) monthly increments of "done" functionality. We've already been using Scrum to periodically repel potential randomizations and unrealistic goals, too, which is great.
So, for those of you still thinking about Scrum, I'm happy to report that it has lived up to expectations and we found it a pretty good fit, even for a big organization like the Developer Division. So give it a try!
Take care,
Chris
