Technical stories - are they included on the backlog?

If you're not already a member of the Scrum development group on Yahoo, you really should join. There's a fortune of information changing hands and you can learn so much from the interactions. Just recently there was a huge debate on the topic of technical stories.

Sprint start and stop days - what's best

Firstly, let me state that it is imperative that sprint lengths remain consistent. By all means experiment with 1 week, 2 week or 3 week sprints but once you have figured out your sweet spot, stick to it. This is important to setup a rhythm in the company. However, the question is what days are the best days during the week to start and stop sprints. Until now, I have been a big fan of Monday starts and ending Fridays. It seems to be a natural cadence and the days are logical transition points.

However, this week, there was discussion on the Scrum development forum and a number of folks are in favor of starting on Thursday and ending on Wednesday. Reasons given are as follows:

• There are often holidays on Mondays and Fridays which interrupt the cycle and therefore the rhythm.

• If sprints are a little behind and you end on a Friday, it will force teams to work on the weekends -- generally shunned upon by the Agile community.

• On Fridays, folks generally tend to glide through the demos and retrospectives and as a result there is a drop in productivity.
• Team members work from home on Fridays.

The right answer, let the team decide.

Certainly school for thought. I have to give this a try.

What's been your experience?

Jack

Remote contract workers

A question posted this morning on one of the Yahoo groups ..

" We have a Scrum team in the Silicon Valley and two contractors who work with us remotely. Although they are proficient at what they do, it has been a challenge to get them (understandably so as contractors) to be apart of the team. We have two main issues:

1) They are contractors and don't see Scrum as more than just something to do to
keep a contract.
2) Daily meetings and full conversation required for communication saturation
are next to impossible over the phone (and really poor quality, unreliable Skype
video), and despite our efforts there is a disconnect and a lack of
effectiveness felt by everyone.

Agile and Lean - Closer than you think

Sara Peyton published a really informative blog today on Lean Software development. Essentially it's a pretty detailed overview of the characteristics of Lean. The point of the blog however is to outline the differences between Agile and Lean. As Sara points out, "Agile has a different perspective from Lean and, generally, has a narrower focus".

Whilst I agree with the fact that Lean is much more broad, there are more similarities with Agile than one would expect. If we examine each of the 7 principles discussed in this blog, and relate them to Agile it's pretty obvious to me that Lean and Agile go hand in hand. Now when I speak of Agile, let me clarify what I mean.

Why switch to Agile - besides failure

Photo by: The Letter E

There's a thread currently bouncing around the Yahoo Agile group as to why organizations would consider switching to Agile. A lot has been said about project failures and there's debating back and forth as to what statistical data is out there to back a company's decision to switch.

The way I see things is that both Waterfall projects and Agile projects succeed and fail. So it's not just because projects fail that one should switch. Most certainly that's a big reason. But there's many other reasons why company's should switch. One only needs to read the Chaos report by the Standish group to realize that there's most likely a better way to do things than traditional methods. Lets face it. There were a lot of smart people behind the Agile movement and so there were reasons that they sought to find a better way.

So what are the other reasons to switch, there are many tell tale signs to look for in your organization for example and this is not an exhaustive list: