My team has moved to a thing we call “ScrumBan” and it’s worked pretty well. There still are 15-min Dailies, and a Review and a Retrospective each Sprint, but we cut almost all meetings that are about sitting around and “planning” tasks (aka awful 7-hour meetings where everyone just zones out and guesses random story point numbers). Instead, tasks are planned and moved to the board on demand and never in the presence of the entire team. It gives everyone so much more time to just focus on their work.
Most teams I’ve been in would do a time boxed task (sometimes referred to as a spike) in those cases. Basically, you get a task with maybe 3 or 5 story points, and the goal is to either complete it or find out what it takes to do so. Then you make follow-up tasks for the next sprint. It’s worked pretty well for me in those cases with a lot of uncertainty.
Yeah thats tough. I hate when they do that. The beauty is, it doesnt matter. Usually I just drop a mid number and agile seems to give the flexibility to change that as you identify the true scope of work. Do what you can in the sprint, but eventually update the points to match or break it up and adjust points best you can at that point. Given I haven’t been doing agile long, so I could be missunderstanding how it should work.
I love working on the edge of exploration, but also recognize it’s going to be a lot of dipping the toes in and seeing what the water is like before I can reliably predict these things. I’m fortunate that no one on my team does what I do, so, sometimes they just accept “will report back next week with an estimate based on actual research”.
also not getting ambushed with large hypotheticals beyond our actual tool chain support help but <shrug>
That’s scrum. One of the defining features of scrum is timeboxing meetings. Daily standups are 15 minutes. A two week review should be two hours. Ditto for retrospectives and sprint planning.
A seven hour meeting means the scrum master wasn’t doing their job.
At my last job I had to endure 2-hour daily standups involving 120 people. Yes, I know that that’s as far from actual agile as you can possibly get – we still called it “agile”.
My team has moved to a thing we call “ScrumBan” and it’s worked pretty well. There still are 15-min Dailies, and a Review and a Retrospective each Sprint, but we cut almost all meetings that are about sitting around and “planning” tasks (aka awful 7-hour meetings where everyone just zones out and guesses random story point numbers). Instead, tasks are planned and moved to the board on demand and never in the presence of the entire team. It gives everyone so much more time to just focus on their work.
how many different ways can I say “I simply don’t know yet?”
well give us a guess
could be one point… could be 50? I DON’T KNOW
well yeah but give it a guess anyway
Most teams I’ve been in would do a time boxed task (sometimes referred to as a spike) in those cases. Basically, you get a task with maybe 3 or 5 story points, and the goal is to either complete it or find out what it takes to do so. Then you make follow-up tasks for the next sprint. It’s worked pretty well for me in those cases with a lot of uncertainty.
Yeah thats tough. I hate when they do that. The beauty is, it doesnt matter. Usually I just drop a mid number and agile seems to give the flexibility to change that as you identify the true scope of work. Do what you can in the sprint, but eventually update the points to match or break it up and adjust points best you can at that point. Given I haven’t been doing agile long, so I could be missunderstanding how it should work.
I love working on the edge of exploration, but also recognize it’s going to be a lot of dipping the toes in and seeing what the water is like before I can reliably predict these things. I’m fortunate that no one on my team does what I do, so, sometimes they just accept “will report back next week with an estimate based on actual research”.
also not getting ambushed with large hypotheticals beyond our actual tool chain support help but <shrug>
That’s scrum. One of the defining features of scrum is timeboxing meetings. Daily standups are 15 minutes. A two week review should be two hours. Ditto for retrospectives and sprint planning.
A seven hour meeting means the scrum master wasn’t doing their job.
At my last job I had to endure 2-hour daily standups involving 120 people. Yes, I know that that’s as far from actual agile as you can possibly get – we still called it “agile”.