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Scrum or ScrumBut ?

Last post 07:43 pm March 19, 2018 by Sjoerd Nijland
6 replies
MARK PERRONE
06:22 pm February 23, 2018

I would be most interested in getting some opinions on my companies take on Scrum.  There are some oddities with processes, roles, etc.

I realize there can be hybrid frameworks and I think plain Scrum as described in the guide works great.  So, have at it.  I would more than happy

to forward any criticisms to the manager.  They're using jira to manage the scrum artifacts and meetings

Backlog Grooming

  1. Project Owner Creates Epic in Jira under the reporting project.  Stories are under the appropriate epic
  2. Scrum Master and Project Owner work together to create initial user stories to meet needs of report

Sprint Planning

  1. During Sprint Planning, Project Owner presents goals of sprint and reviews user stories with the team.
    1. Team Can ask questions and start clarifying Reporting requirements
  2. Project Owners priorities requirements
  3. Team assigns story points ("Complexity score") to stories
    1. If a user story has  complexity score above 13, story needs to be broken out into 2 or more stories
  4. Project Owners Re-priorities requirements based on team feedback, if needed.
  5. Team commits to specific user stories for upcoming sprint
  6. Team creates tasks to complete user story.

Daily Stand up

  1. Team Identifies hinderance to meeting sprint goals (committed user stories)
    1. Outside of standup, Project Owner works with scrum master to remove identified hinderances
  2. Team members note completed tasks, and general progress and risks of user stories.

Sprint Review

  1. Team presents deliverable user stories for Project Owner review and approval
    1. If approved, feature may be pushed to Cab for release, or be added to work done to be released at once
    2. If rejected, user stories is updated with additional requirements and sent back to backlog for dev work
Ian Mitchell
06:48 pm February 23, 2018

For all anyone else knows, this could be the optimum process for your organization. Even that part about pushing work to Cab, which severely undermines the likelihood of the operating context being a lean or agile one at all.

Why though, is there an assumption that Scrum is somehow being implemented? You, yourself, at least suspect that this is not the case. What does the organization actually hope to gain from this pretence?

Daria Bagina
06:51 pm February 23, 2018

Thanks for sharing. It's always interesting to see what's going on in different companies.

My first question here would be: what's that role "Project Owner"? 

Why I ask is: terminology is important, using incorrect terminology may lead to implementing wrong changes. So in this case I assum the role of a Project Owner is not the same as of a Product Owner.

Timothy Baffa
09:29 pm February 23, 2018

It is rare to find a shop where Scrum is being practiced perfectly.   What is important, as a Scrum Master, is to identify practices that support an Agile mindset, and practices that run counter to Agile, and to make such observations as visible as possible.

There were several items that stood out to me in your Sprint Planning outline:

  1. Why is the team waiting until Sprint Planning to provide an estimate?   
  2. How do unestimated stories help the Product Owner from a planning perspective?   
  3. What is the Product Owner using to determine what is a reasonable offer to make to the Development Team, if the stories are not sized?
  4. The Development Team should make a "forecast" for the upcoming sprint, not a commitment

 

Curtis Slough
10:53 pm February 23, 2018

In addition to everything that Ian, Daria, and Tim mentioned, do you have a clear definition of done? It doesn't seem to be the case if there is a chance where deliverable user stories would be rejected. If there is a definition of done, which was met by the dev team, the product owner and stakeholders should not be making changes to that definition of done at the Review. If a story is developed and then determined to not meet expectations, it seems that is a new backlog item that needs to be created to be performed at a later sprint. 

Olivier Ledru
09:45 am February 26, 2018

Why waiting for the Review to get feedback from the PO ? How can the PO "reject" an item that is supposed to be done according to the DOD ?

The PO seems not to be IN the Scrum Team, does (s)he ?

Sjoerd Nijland
05:46 pm March 18, 2018

I collected a number of ScrumButs and wrote an article about it: get ready for the ultimate Scrum cringe! 

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