I gave this talk at the Auckland Girl Geek Dinner (organised by Amanda Jackson) on 24 September 2009. To sign up for other GGD events go to girlgeekdinners.co.nz.
Agile Alliance came up with this manifesto. Note that we value the left hand items MORE, not INSTEAD.
Product Owner. Owns the business problem and makes all priority decisions. Come back to this with our experiences. Will do this a bit, so save your questions because I’ll probably answer them. In our case, the senior BA played this role. Team. Pigs and Chickens. The team are the pigs. Scrum Master. Serve and protect the team. Help them understand and follow the practice of Scrum (including product owner). Not the PM role! Stakeholders: first big learning – projects still have lots of these. Product owner must listen & engage. Project Manager (come back to this)
Here’s our team room. Colocate! Note the lack of windows. Good things: we were all together, had heaps of wall room, had a door we could shut. Not ideal, but way better than not being in a room together. Ideal room has more people space, a whiteboard, more desk space. And windows. This is the reason the rest of the photos are a bit grey.
The theory… Note the actual mechanism for creating a good PB is outside Scrum per se, and where you have to slot in other techniques eg use case, user stories, reqts analysis, solution design Mention User Stories here
Photo of a PB card, and photo of site map, and photo of a PB list on a wall. We did start with a big idea and wind up with a list of things to do. How we did that, is not specifically prescribed in the Scrum methodology and it deserves its own place. Once we had the list, here’s how we prioritised it. We were building an intranet site, and we had the sitemap by this point. So … list of non-site-map items and then a site map. Got the stakeholders with the product owner to move the sitemap and non-sitemap items into the sprints. At this point we’d also decided how many sprints and how long: driven entirely by budget. So anything that didn’t go into the sprint was left on the “Later” list. Note: not thrown away.
It’s really about micromanagement. But in a good way.