Perhaps your foray into Scrum and Agile isn't working out as you'd hoped. Or maybe your team is rolling along with Agile but something feels off. Maybe it's time to take a closer look at your processes, where it's diverging from what's recommended, and see if you need to adjust. I recently attended a class to obtain Scrum Master Certification and it was a great way for meet to get a refresher on the basics and evaluate what we are doing right and what we might want to improve.
I'm not a religious zealot who things that a process like Scrum and Agile must be followed to the letter in order for it to benefit your organization; however I think it's very beneficial to understand why you are deciding to change a process and what you're going to get out of doing so.
One of the things I noticed about our current process was that we often left a lot of unfinished items at the end of the sprint. We did a lot of work, but that work wasn't being counted in the sprint, and we would just end up carrying it over to the next one. During class I was reminded that stories in a sprint need to be completed in that sprint in order for that work to be counted, and that provides some of the push to get things completed in a "shippable" state that meets whatever acceptance criteria you define. Since we were letting so many things slide over in to the next sprint it was starting to make the sprint definitions less meaningful, not to mention we were slipping on creating good unit and end to end tests for each new story. Working on a better acceptance criteria, or "definition of done" was a good way to help us get back on track and create doable stories that provide distinct, useful features and functionality.
I'll go into some other lessons learned from taking a look at and refining our processes in my next post.
Have you improved your work by stepping back and taking a look at what's working and not working? If so how?
No comments:
Post a Comment