SCRUM as your management process tool... Anyone?

AlexCode

Hi, I'm reading a lot about SCRUM and its benefits and constraints as I intend to change my team's management process. What I would like to have is some feedback from the field, either from managers that have implemented it and from the ones that have to live by the rules of it. I read statements from books but they feel like too good or too "clean" to be true and usually only reflect the manager point of view. What do you think? Did it really "oiled" your process flywheels and got things to work better? Did the team complaint about anything or made them unhappy in any way that would affect productivity? As a employee that lives by the rules of SCRUM: Do you like it? Do you feel it's better now than it was before? (if before applies to you) Would you change anything? Thanks! :-\ Alex

James Simpson

I like it, It keeps the customers close, keeps the requirements undercontrol and keeps everyone in the loop. It works well if people can voice their issues. This is my oppinion from a Dev Lead, rather than a project manager.. James

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Paul Watson

We don't do SCRUM but we do follow agile (small a.) It is good but my biggest beef is a lack of good tools. Xplanner and bugzilla are a joke.

regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa

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At least he achieved immortality for a few years.

benjymous

I was a coder when SCRUM was introduced to our way of working, and two years later I'm a team lead. From both sides of the coin it's been very beneficial - it gives the whole team more of a feeling of ownership, since everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and will chip in to help somebody is behind, rather than one guy just plodding on with a never ending backlog of tasks. Having sensibly defined "stories" works much better too, rather than big gargantuan tasks that never seem to end, and the sprint reviews are very valuable helping other teams understand what your team is up to.

-- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!

benjymous

We've just started using Hansoft[^] which seems to be working reasonably well (once we got used to all of its peculiarities!)

-- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!

AlexCode

As for my tickets tool I use one we developed. It has a web interface so that the support department can interact with it from anywhere and to the "inside" we have a windows app, with an UI similar to MSN Messenger, that lets us filter our tasks, assign tasks, set priorities, show reports, etc. This is the only management tool we use now.

Mustafa Ismail Mustafa

Have you tried Bugtracker[^]? Its not perfect, but its not bad.

"Every time Lotus Notes starts up, somewhere a puppy, a kitten, a lamb, and a baby seal are killed. Lotus Notes is a conspiracy by the forces of Satan to drive us over the brink into madness. The CRC-32 for each file in the installation includes the numbers 666." Gary Wheeler "You're an idiot." John Simmons, THE Outlaw programmer "I realised that all of my best anecdotes started with "So there we were, pissed". Pete O'Hanlon

Paul Watson

Thanks but ASP.NET won't fly here unless the app is really something special :) Also IMO bugs, features, tasks, stories etc. should all be tracked in one system as issues. Right now we have to manually copy between xplanner and bugzilla which is a right royal PITA.

regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa

Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:

At least he achieved immortality for a few years.

Xiangyang Liu

Since moving to a new team, I have been attending SCRUM meeting everyday. I have no idea why it is called SCRUM meeting until I saw your post and googled for it. :)

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Mustafa Ismail Mustafa

That looks interesting. Peculiarities such as what? Some can be a real pain.

"Every time Lotus Notes starts up, somewhere a puppy, a kitten, a lamb, and a baby seal are killed. Lotus Notes is a conspiracy by the forces of Satan to drive us over the brink into madness. The CRC-32 for each file in the installation includes the numbers 666." Gary Wheeler "You're an idiot." John Simmons, THE Outlaw programmer "I realised that all of my best anecdotes started with "So there we were, pissed". Pete O'Hanlon

AlexCode

How do you deal with unexpected pressure? I mean, we don't actually have a technical support team, we have a field team that have enough technical knowledge to "filter" most of the customers problems but still plenty of them fall into the dev team schedule with an URGENT tag. How does it affect the SCRUM process and how do you work things out?

Mustafa Ismail Mustafa

Ah, I forget you don't code on/for windows.

"Every time Lotus Notes starts up, somewhere a puppy, a kitten, a lamb, and a baby seal are killed. Lotus Notes is a conspiracy by the forces of Satan to drive us over the brink into madness. The CRC-32 for each file in the installation includes the numbers 666." Gary Wheeler "You're an idiot." John Simmons, THE Outlaw programmer "I realised that all of my best anecdotes started with "So there we were, pissed". Pete O'Hanlon

AlexCode

:doh: So you were never explained about the methodology your team was following? :wtf: I bet you may have some other question that you quite don't have an answer. Maybe a link is in order here: http://www.controlchaos.com/[^]

benjymous

It's mostly just UI/keyboard control oddities, like F5 isn't refresh (it takes you to a particular page) and the way you drag drop elements in a tree takes a while of getting used to (to set a task as a child of another, you drag it to sit directly below the parent, then tab-indent the task) I believe there's a free limited user trail, so it's probably best to just have a play!

-- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!

benjymous

We've settled into a large scrum team, that works on estimated tasks, and a smaller quick response team which operates outside of the scrum, and handles quick fixes. Users go to the quick response team, who can either fix the problems themselves, or craft them into stories for the next sprint (or later) if they're too complex.

-- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!

AlexCode

That procedure doesn't apply to the structure of my big project. It's an ERP to a estate department that involves 17 applications. As we are on this for almost 3 years now we don't have many quick fixes, and when we have I don't care much about them, we just do them without any consideration. The problems that bother me are the ones that are urgent and take half a day or more to complete. As urgent I mean bugs that won't let customers go on with their work. These kind of bugs are specially problematic when we're talking about the financial department... when they must process the salaries and a certain calc isn't being well done or latter on that day the customer have a meeting and that report isn't showing correctly... No small team would be able to fix this kind of bugs as they need deep knowledge of the business of a certain app, so we need to stop what we're doing and call the "fire department" to cool down the fire. This will mess the whole plan for the current and subsequent days. How well does SCRUM handles this?

PIEBALDconsult

My boss keeps talking about it, I don't know what he's talking about, I just go my merry way.