org.suls.blog

Last wednesday the 3rd (?) Scrum Breakfast organised by Peter Stevens took place at namics in Zurich. I decided to attend with Cédric as part of the preparation for our upcoming bachelor thesis.
The event started at 8 am and I had the chance to meet Marc from umantis. He is about to apply Scrum on a project and therefore had many interesting questions. While talking about how to manage a backlog, Marcello who later gave the talk, joined our discussion. He introduced us to the idea of "story points" - an approach to classify a user story by it's complexity rather than estimating it's working hours.

Later on, Peter started the presentation by welcoming the 25 attendees and explaining that starting with this breakfast, the focus will be on case studies. Marcello took over and started his talk about his experiences on the WLC project. I am not going to summarise his presentation here as it is available online (thanks Peter). Although I would like to highlight some points he made:

• Planning based on story points. Rate the smallest work package as a 2.
• Customer day, Product owner on the team picture.
  
• Planning poker - motivate less senior developers to express themself by avoiding round robbing questionaires. Use poker cards! :-)
• Definition of done. Be sure the costumer and you understand the same..

The following discussion was mainly about how to apply Scrum on existing teams. Some serious problems were mentioned in terms of chief architecs or PMs not willing to loose responsibility. Marc also raised a question how to prevent burning out the team members by doing sprint after sprint. In response, Marcello and Francios Bachmann both pointed out the difference between a sprint and a marathon - you won't win a marathon by sprinting!


I must say that I hesistated before going to the scrum breakfast. I didn't know if a CS student was welcomed at kinda senior meeting. But after all I am more than happy that I took part and I am looking forward to the upcoming breakfasts. Hannes might be there as well the next time ;-)