Scrum and XP from the Trenches: How We Do Scrum

✍ Scribed by Henrik Kniberg

• Publisher: InfoQ
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 183
• Edition: 2nd
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This second edition is an annotated version, a “director’s cut” where Henrik reflects upon the content and shares new insights gained since the first version of the book.

The tricky part to agile software development is that there is no manual telling you exactly how to do it. You have to experiment and continuously adapt the process until it suits your specific situation.
This book aims to give you a head start by providing a detailed down-to-earth account of how one Swedish company implemented Scrum and XP with a team of approximately 40 people and how they continuously improved their process over a year’s time.
Under the leadership of Henrik Kniberg they experimented with different team sizes, different sprint lengths, different ways of defining “done”, different formats for product backlogs and sprint backlogs, different testing strategies, different ways of doing demos, different ways of synchronizing multiple Scrum teams, etc. They also experimented with XP practices – different ways of doing continuous build, pair programming, test driven development, etc, and how to combine this with Scrum.

This book includes:
Practical tips and tricks for most Scrum and XP practices
Typical pitfalls and how they were addressed
Diagrams and photos illustrating day-to-day work
Testing and test-driven development
Scaling and coordinating multiple teams
Dealing with resistance from inside and outside the team
Planning and time estimation techniques

✦ Table of Contents

Intro..................................................................................................1
Disclaimer.......................................................................................................3
Why I wrote this............................................................................................3
But what is Scrum?........................................................................................3
How we do product backlogs............................................. 5
Additional story fields...................................................................................8
How we keep the product backlog at a business level................................9
How we prepare for sprint planning............................11
How we do sprint planning.............................................. 15
Why the product owner has to attend......................................................16
Why quality is not negotiable....................................................................18
Sprint planning meetings that drag on and on…......................................20
Sprint-planning-meeting agenda...............................................................21
Defining the sprint length..........................................................................22
Defining the sprint goal..............................................................................23
Deciding which stories to include in the sprint........................................25
How can product owner affect which stories make it to the sprint?......26
How does the team decide which stories to include in the sprint?.........27
Estimating using gut feel.............................................................................28
Estimating using velocity calculations.......................................................29
Which estimating technique do we use?...................................................33
Why we use index cards.............................................................................34
Definition of “done”.....................................................................................37
Time estimating using planning poker.....................................................38
Clarifying stories..........................................................................................41
Breaking down stories into smaller stories...............................................43
Breaking down stories into tasks...............................................................43
Defining time and place for the daily scrum.............................................45
Where to draw the line...............................................................................46
Tech stories..................................................................................................47
Bug tracking system vs. product backlog..................................................50
Sprint planning meeting is finally over!....................................................51
How we communicate sprints.........................................53
How we do sprint backlogs...............................................57
Sprint-backlog format.................................................................................58
How the task board works..........................................................................60
How the burn-down chart works.............................................................63
Task-board warning signs..........................................................................64
Hey, what about traceability?!....................................................................66
Estimating days vs. hours............................................................................67
How we arrange the team room.....................................69
The design corner........................................................................................70
Seat the team together!...............................................................................71
Keep the product owner at bay..................................................................73
Keep the managers and coaches at bay......................................................73
How we do daily scrums.....................................................75
How we update the task board...................................................................76
Dealing with latecomers.............................................................................78
Dealing with “I don’t know what to do today”..........................................78
How we do sprint demos..................................................... 81
Why we insist that all sprints end with a demo.......................................82
Checklist for sprint demos..........................................................................83
Dealing with indemonstrable stuff............................................................84
How we do sprint retrospectives...................................85
Why we insist that all teams do retrospectives........................................86
How we organize retrospectives................................................................87
Spreading lessons learned between teams.................................................89
To change or not to change........................................................................90
Examples of things that may come up during retrospectives..................91
Slack time between sprints...............................................93
How we do release planning and fixed-price
contracts......................................................................................97
Define your acceptance thresholds............................................................98
Time-estimate the most important items.................................................99
Estimate velocity........................................................................................101
Put it together into a release plan.............................................................102
Adapting the release plan..........................................................................103
How we combine Scrum with XP................................105
Pair programming.....................................................................................106
Test-driven development (TDD).............................................................107
Incremental design....................................................................................111
Continuous integration.............................................................................111
Collective code ownership........................................................................112
Informative workspace.............................................................................112
Sustainable pace/energized work.............................................................114
How we do testing.................................................................115
You probably can’t get rid of the acceptance-test phase.........................116
Minimize the acceptance-test phase........................................................117
Increase quality by putting testers in the Scrum team...........................118
Increase quality by doing less per sprint..................................................121
Should acceptance testing be part of the sprint?.....................................122
Sprint cycles vs. acceptance-test cycles....................................................123
Don’t outrun the slowest link in your chain...........................................127
Back to reality.............................................................................................128
How we handle multiple Scrum teams.....................129
How many teams to create?......................................................................130
Why we introduced a “team lead” role....................................................135
How we allocate people to teams.............................................................137
Specialized teams – or not?.......................................................................139
Rearrange teams between sprints – or not?............................................142
Part-time team members..........................................................................143
How we do scrum-of-scrums...................................................................144
Interleaving the daily scrums....................................................................147
Firefighting teams......................................................................................148
Splitting the product backlog – or not?...................................................149
Code branching..........................................................................................154
Multi-team retrospectives........................................................................155
How we handle geographically distributed teams....
157
Offshoring..................................................................................................159
Team members working from home.......................................................161
Scrum-master checklist....................................................163
Beginning of sprint....................................................................................164
Every day....................................................................................................164
End of sprint...............................................................................................165
Parting words.........................................................................167

✦ Subjects

Информатика и вычислительная техника;Управление IT-проектами;Agile / XP / SCRUM;