The Scrum Management (A Practical Example)

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Introduction

As a brief introduction, Scrum is an agile process for software development. With Scrum, projects progress via a series of iterations called sprints. Each sprint is typically 2-4 weeks long. Scrum is ideally suited for projects with rapidly changing or highly emergent requirements. I have found it ideal for in-house development though it's equally recommended for third party clients because of rapid change of requirements.

Introduction to Terms

A Practical Example: How We Do Sprint Planning?

Let's suppose we have one Project Manager as a product owner (In most cases, we don't find stakeholders, customers present all the time), then a scrum master (can be your team lead) then we have a team of 2 developers, 1 designer and 1 database admin.

Note that I am using developer1 as a scrum master. as show in the figure below:

Story Points

Let's suppose we have discussed in our sprint plan total six tasks. A story point can also be represented as a day but a story point is actually the amount of time you can put to work on any specific story or task.

In other words, we have a total of:

5 + 3 + 7+ 1+ 3 + 6 = 25 points

Man Days

You can always do from 2-4 week sprints, however I prefer 2 weeks of sprint planning. Imagine in 2 weeks of sprint plan, each member has 14 man days. But we always ask in sprint plan if any of our team member has booked their annual leave. Let's suppose developer1 has booked 3 annual leave days, developer2 booked 4 annual leave days, designer booked 2 annual leave days where database admin has no annual leaves booked. In this case, we have:

In this, we have total man days = 51

Focus Factor

Now let's suppose we have focus factor as 50%.

Focus factor is basically the amount of time we can give to our stories (tasks) in our next 2 weeks of sprint. We use a "focus factor" to help account for all the interruptions we will invariably have. When we plan a sprint, we multiply the ideal man hours available in the sprint (40 hours * 2 weeks * x developers) by a percentage such as 0.8. That calculation tells us how many hours worth of product backlog items we can commit to for the sprint.

Estimated Velocity

( Available man days * Focus factor = Estimated velocity )

in our case, we have:

47 * 0.50 (50%) = 23 story points

So our estimated velocity for the upcoming sprint is 23 story points. That means the team should add stories to the sprint until it adds up to approximately 23. In this case, we will remove our task 5 which can be less important and may not fit in this scrum and we will move it to our product backlog.

Scrum board

And that is how our scrum board will look like:

Not Checked Out	Checked Out	Done

I will update you regarding the burn down chart and daily scrum meeting in my next post.

References

• http://agilemanifesto.org/
• http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum
• http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/whatisxp.htm