Skip to main content

Rituals

What rituals are there for an agile scrum team?

Each sprint (ours are 3 weeks) has

Scrum aka standup
The goal is 15 minute daily meeting

The common three questions are:
What did you do yesterday?
What will you do today?
What is in your way?

The goal is transparency, everyone on the team should have the opportunity to know what each person is working on, and for the team to all get an idea of where they are on the commitments for the sprint, what issues there are, and use the opportunity to help out other team mates as needed.

Grooming
The goal is to prepare work for upcoming sprints, break epics (large goals that will span sprints) into stories (a deliverable piece of work, as small as you can make it and still assign value). Each story should be assigned a complexity rating, or story point. These are Fibonacci numbers (1, 3, 5, 8). These are complexity not hours!

Retrospective
At the end of the sprint look back
What action items did we have last sprint, did we make progress?
How many points did we complete?
How many did we rollover into this upcoming sprint?
How does this compare to our average?
Did we point these stories correctly?
What stories rolled? Why? How can we prevent this in the future?
What went well and we should keep doing?
What did not go well and we need to improve - and action items to make that happen.

Demos
Show off what you finished to stakeholders, customers, product owners... Anyone you think might like to see it and provide feedback. You can to get feedback as fast as possible to make sure you are going the right direction.

Sprint planning
Figure out how many story points you have done in the past, what your teams availability is, and commit to finish a specific set of stories (preferably in priority order where possible) totalling that number of story points. You need to break these stories into tasks, with estimate hours (if you do that, once a team matures enough you can skip that if there is a regular cadence of tasks completing - but the team needs to get good at sizing the tasks small enough for this first).
Always assume 20% meetings and misc.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How do I find the Custom Field ID in Jira Cloud?

So you need to find the Custom Field ID in Jira Cloud. Perhaps you need the ID for a custom field to work on soem code, an API call or a script. How do you find it? You can find the ID in the URL when managing custom fields Jira - Settings - Issues - Fields - Custom Fields https://***.atlassian.net/secure/admin/ViewCustomFields.jspa Select "Edit" on the desired custom field .../admin/EditCustomField!default.jspa?id=12802 There you go! It is that number at the end of the URL Alternately, you can use ScriptRunner Jira - Setttings - Add-ons - Script Runner - Script Console and run the following def issueKey = '***-####' def result = get('/rest/api/2/issue/' + issueKey)         .header('Content-Type', 'application/json')         .asObject(Map) if (result.status == 200){     return result.body.fields } else {     return "Failed to find issue: Status: ${result.status} ${result....
Post a Comment
Read more

When Hiring (Job Posts)

I know this is not about Agile specifically but I wanted to share how I craft Job Posts when hiring, I would love to continue to improve my process. When writing a Job Post I do the following; Have boilerplate about the company itself. Yes, the candidate should dig more but you want them to want to apply and want to research. Describe the Role, where the department fits within the company, what the team/departments purpose is, and what normal activities the job will encompass. Indicate the type of person/passions which would work well List requirements , real requirements, this should be 5 or less, these should be demonstrable items Demonstrable - Upbeat attitude is not easy to demonstrate, for example Always have alternatives to a major! Great technical people can have humanities majors – i.e. use “or equivalent experience” List bonuses/ nice to have /additional items that a candidate would benefit by having Explain the benefits of the company (should be boilerplate tal...
1 comment
Read more

What is Agile and How Can I Use it Well?

I gave a talk at BSidesLV 2018 In the "Proving Ground" track for new speakers "What is Agile and How Can I Use it Well?" Are you a person who works with Agile developers? Are they driving you nuts? This presentation will explain the core tenets of Agile and how they apply to you, the security wonk. What you may not realize is that at its core Agile is about delivering a product, fast. Agile teams are focused on delivering a minimal viable product, getting feedback, and improving both the product and the process through iterative and continuous improvement. With a keen understanding of Agile forged in the trenches of large deployments, this presentation shows you how to effectively scale your team in order to have security be an integrated part of the Agile iterations. Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sCM5si8UxtOusDlBeecXudstDf9idDFQWadhLtMHPpg/edit#slide=id.p Be sure to read the speaker's notes! Video: https:// youtu...
1 comment
Read more