First steps in Scrum

How it began

While we saw, that the old way of developing software was full of adversities, like missing the milestones, getting things that nobody needed or just a general bad quality of software without documentation, we decided to try something new. The team-leader, Rene , picked Scrum as the most hyped methodology to meet our problems.

So we started by reading books, blogs and other sources and picked Agilo as basically cost-free software to work along that line.

To be honest, the only good result was that the programmers liked the 2-week sprints because of the better prepared job definition and tasks. At least for that short duration they got clear messages what to do. We didn’t use a task board and relied pretty much on the free Agile features.

But still I did not saw major improvements. To increase our professionalism, we decided to get a coaching with Boris Gloger.

The real start of practicing SCRUM

Now we returned excited and enthusiastic with new knowledge and many ideas. So far, the coaching may have looked for others like a brainwash, but it was just a mind- and eye opener.

Our first important step was to skip the scrum software as backlog and use a plain physical board with 6 sections:

• Product backlog,
• Selected Stories,
• Tasks to do,
• Tasks in progress,
• Done
• …and a section for the burn-down chart

Rene is adding the first user story to the sprint board
Originally uploaded by Stephan’s Place.

We had a crude situation in the company, which has a open-plan office in an old factory area and therefore a lack of walls were you could mount a white-board. So we decided to channel the glass divider-wall of the former smoker area to sprint planning wall and used it as  a background for our post-notes.

Now we were able to start and in the next article I’ll tell you more about our ground breaking results.

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