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A Couple Scrum Guide Questions

Last post 05:30 am September 2, 2015 by Soumya Das
3 replies
09:38 pm August 29, 2015

1. Regarding the Sprint Goal section, what does the following lines really mean?

"The selected Product Backlog items deliver one coherent function, which can be the Sprint Goal. The Sprint Goal can be any other coherence that causes the Development Team to work together rather than on separate initiatives."

Particularly, the part about separate initiatives? If I have a Dev Team that has 4 software developers on it, and our application has an employee side and an admin side, is it frowned upon to have 2 pairing on one side and 2 pairing on another and then each pair team code reviews the others pair as part of the DoD? Just a hypothetical here.

2. Regarding the Sprint Retrospective section, there are 3 purposes of the Sprint Retrospective. Of those 3, one of them is to identify and "order the major items that went well" and potential improvements.

I've facilitated 50ish is retrospectives in the last 2 years, but we've never ordered the major items that went well - certainly we always discuss them and come up with at least one kaizen for our sprint backlog for the next sprint, but the order word is something I just noticed after reading this guide several, several times.

That was my only "I'm not 100% sure what that means" part of the guide. Thanks in advance for helping.


Anonymous
02:10 pm August 31, 2015

1. My interpretation is that the point of a stated sprint goal is to focus on the current iteration. If a team's sprint goal starts sounding like four totally different things, then it probably means that each of the four engineers is working on a totally different thing. This is counter to scrum ideals, because in scrum we want people teams to be focused and swarming the team's work wherever possible.

2. Not sure on this one :) I would guesss that it would help a team with many points to decide which are the most important to recognize. I rarely have a team give more than maybe a dozen items, though, so they probably wouldn't find ordering them as useful.


12:26 am September 1, 2015

> ...is it frowned upon to have 2 pairing on one
> side and 2 pairing on another and then each
> pair team code reviews the others pair as part of the DoD?

If there's no Sprint Goal which caused them to self-organize in this way, then Scrum is not being applied.

> ...we've never ordered the major items that went well

The Guide says "Identify and order the major items that went well and potential improvements". Good practices are identified. Where there is potential for further improvement, then those improvements ought to be ordered.


05:30 am September 2, 2015

Q> Who is responsible for overseeing the daily variances of the project in the Daily Meeting?

My answer will be Development Team.

As per scrum guide 1. "Scrum Users must frequently inspect scrum artifacts and progress towards a Sprint Goal to detect undesirable variance.”
2. The Development Team uses the Daily Scrum to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and to inspect how progress is trending toward completing the work in the Sprint Backlog
On Daily meeting PO and SM are optional.




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