Sprint 5 complete

Greetings all –

 

            Well, sprint 5 ended and yesterday we had the sprint review.  Overall the sprint was successful, although we did have one work item bleed over (which we of course disclosed to the stakeholders at the sprint review).

 

We had small turnout from stakeholders & management.  We had one manager (my boss) and one stakeholder from within the division.  I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon: now that we’re making good progress, the attention we get from management has been greatly reduced.  I suppose this is natural and encouraging, since it’s the inevitable plight of managers to spend much of their time on problem areas.

 

            In any case, morale on the team seems to be good and we feel pretty positive about how things are going.  Our VP & our managers are impressed with what we’ve done, which is a great position to be in.

 

            One thing that a number of team members have independently noted in the past couple weeks is that Scrum’s iterative nature is very good at highlighting problems and making it easier to fix, because the memory of the problem and its cause are fresh in your mind.  Everything we learned during sprint 5 and at the sprint retrospective will be fed into the planning for sprint 6.

 

            My biggest concern now is how to keep Scrum going once the division spins up the next major release.  My fear is that they’ll employ some kind of heavy-handed waterfall-oriented process, similar to what’s been done in the past but with even more central controls and constraints on how spec’ing, scheduling, and bug fixing are done.  If it’s done careless then it may not jive well with Scrum.  I’ll have to keep agitating on that front to ensure that whatever we do is iterative-friendly.

 

Over & out!

Chris