The Land that Scrum Forgot

By Robert C. Martin

Scrum is a starting point. In fact, it’s a great starting point. But, as a framework rather than a full-blown methodology, Scrum is deliberately incomplete. Some things—such as the best technical practices to use—are left for individual teams to determine. This allows a team to create the best fit between their project and environment and an assortment of technical practices.

While that selection of practices should belong to the team or organization rather than to a group of methodologists, the benefits of some practices are becoming so compellingly obvious that they warrant consideration by any Scrum team. But, too many Scrum teams become complacent after achieving some early productivity gains with Scrum. And they stop seeking ways to improve. Many fail to try the technical practices necessary for long-term success. In the following article, Robert Martin (perhaps better known as "Uncle Bob") tells us why so many Scrum teams fail to sustain the promise of their early successes.

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Heartbeats: The pace of a Scrum Team

By Rafael Nascimento

One of the challenges in the use of Scrum is to predict how much of functionality a team is able to deliver each sprint. Many try, in a vague attempt to create a metric, to assign a story point a certain amount of work to be delivered, rather than looking how a team play their roles and perform their deliveries. For example, a story point is equivalent to a CRUD with 8 fields that accesses a table in the database. This approach does not work, because a team is made up of people with different experiences, perceptions and problems (personal or professional). Individually and collectively, a team always has different emotional and technical characteristics  from other teams. Team members never take the same time that members of Team B took to adapt to each other. Teams will never manage exactly the same conflict situations or have the same productivity. Finally, in sets filled by human beings, there may even be a statistical  standard for productivity, but never an industry standard, accurate and predictable. There will always be a margin of error. Then comes a question for reflection: is it better to draft a plan and make your team follow this plan at any cost, in favor of a contract or corporate goal? Or would it be better to identify a target and track the performance and growth of your team, guiding it toward its mission, enjoying a harmonious, happy and highly productive environment, and make necessary adjustments to the project plan for the sake of your customers’ satisfaction, offering them transparency, with no surprises?

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How to Sustain Adaptive Planning

By Rahul Sawhney

Scrum and other agile methods recognize that responsiveness to change is an important aspect of delivering projects. They also recognize that software development is evolutionary and creative. By managing changes through Adaptive planning, Scrum provides a simple yet effective method of planning and tracking project progress. In this article, we will examine what is needed to sustain Adaptive planning and improve Team's responsiveness towards customer needs.

We will examine the following factors:

• Just-enough planning
• Evolving plan, scope driven by budget and/or time
• Grooming the scope
• Trust, involvement and collaboration
• Management support

Consider a scenario where the project is progressing as per plan, and in the middle of the project the customer approaches project manager with a request:

Customer: "I really need this functionality delivered in the project. But it is not part of the current scope. Can we make it happen as part of this project?"

Possible response #1:

Project Manager: "Unless you are okay with budget overflow and/or schedule delay. Alternatively, we can revisit the project scope but it will require us to drop certain other functionality from the scope of this project. As the effort already spent on estimation and analysis of that functionality will be wasted, please be aware that it will impact productivity."

Possible response #2:

Project Manager: "Well, I am afraid the change control board (CCB) needs to decide this. The CCB meets in two weeks and once they approve that an investigation is needed, we can investigate and inform them about the impact on our plan. The CCB can then decide whether or not this functionality can be implemented."

Possible response #3:

Project Manager/Product Owner: "I do not see a problem as long as you are okay with dropping certain low priority items from current scope of the project and getting this functionality at the end of next Sprint, assuming it fits. Let's get together and discuss."

Although many responses are possible depending on the context, if the project is using Adaptive planning then a response similar to response #3 is more likely. Such a response demonstrates that the Team is well prepared to respond to change.

Making Adaptive planning work

- Just-enough planning

To begin with, requirements are understood at a very high level and thereafter, the rest of the planning is driven by priority. As a rule, lesser time is spent on figuring out the details of those requirements that do not have a very high priority. High priority bigger requirements are split into smaller ones so that details can be explored. Only relative size estimates (at a high level) are done at this point to get an idea of how "big" the work is. Once the work is quantified, tasks and effort are estimated for the highest priority requirements. That gives an idea of how much the Team can deliver in a Sprint. This idea is tested in the first Sprint and gives the Team a better understanding of its Velocity (or the size it can deliver in one Sprint). Using the Velocity, the Team is now in a better position to give commitments for later sprints.

- Evolving plan, scope driven by budget and/or time

As the project gets underway and the Team executes multiple sprints, the Team has better visibility on the customer needs. Likewise, the customer also understands the requirements better. This understanding results in evolution of the Product Backlog (e.g. changes in functionality and scope, priority).

As the Product Backlog evolves, the size estimates are done for newly added requirements. The Product burndown chart shows how much work is remaining based on the revised scope in the Product Backlog. The work remaining is controlled usually by removing some low priority requirements (of size equal to the added requirements) from the scope. This ensures that scope is managed continuously based on highest priority requirements.

Adapting the plan in this manner helps in providing better visibility to all stakeholders by tackling many important issues, such as:

• How do we deliver what is most important for the customers?
• How do we address customer feedback on what has been already delivered?
• What are the key changes that we need to make?
• Have we addressed all the key risks for the project?
• How much work is remaining for the project? Do we need to adjust the project scope?

- Grooming the scope

At the beginning of each Sprint, the Team makes a commitment on the functionality it can deliver. In order to make a commitment, the Team may need some time to investigate certain aspects and risks in the preceding Sprint itself. In other words, sometimes it makes sense to look-ahead and reserve some time for investigation on risky items in the backlog that may be part of the next Sprint. Better insight into risky items in the Product Backlog helps the Product Owner make conscious decision on the item's priority, makes the Sprint planning exercise easier and the Team more confident.

Additionally, new functionality requests by Customers can be expected at any point during the project. Sometimes, especially when the functionality is complex or due to other reasons, identifying enough details for quickly giving commitments on these new items at the beginning of the Sprint can be difficult. Grooming the scope during a previous Sprint makes sense.

- Trust, involvement and collaboration

Working with an adaptive plan requires a lot of trust, involvement and collaboration between the Team, the Product Owner and other key stakeholders of the project. Unfortunately this is much easier said than done. Individual stakeholders have different motivating factors and it requires time to build the trust.

Things may become extremely difficult and unsustainable if the trust is lost. The effect of losing trust could result in failures such as poor quality, dramatically reduced velocity, inability to meet commitments for multiple Sprints, arguments over small stuff, high team attrition and loss of face in front of the customers.

Building trust requires a lot of commitment and collaboration. The Product Owner and management should give the Team freedom to decide how much it can deliver in a Sprint. The Product Owner needs to set the right expectations between the customers and the Team. Setting unreasonable expectations can misfire in the long term. The Team may succumb to pressure of delivering more functionality and may succeed in doing so by cutting quality, or by introducing too much technical debt that becomes difficult to handle later. The ScrumMaster needs to support the Team by guarding the scope and the practices of Scrum. The Team needs to understand the needs of the Product Owner and help in achieving that goal. The Team can help in several ways, such as improving its engineering practices, making the most out of feedback, ensuring that it acts on its retrospective actions and highlights issues that are beyond control.

The mechanism of "inspect and adapt" should not be interpreted as a "self-repairing system." The system will not fix the problems unless everyone involved in the process devotes the time needed and is committed to the process. The Team members (ScrumMaster, developers, testers etc.) need to work with each other to achieve the Team's sprint goal and continuously improve their ways of working. They need to work with the Product Owner to groom the scope and understand what is needed.

Likewise, the Product Owner needs to collaborate with the Team throughout. If the Product Owner becomes complacent in engaging with the Team after a few Sprints then the visibility of the Team can reduce drastically, benefits achieved can be quickly erased and situation can deteriorate. The Product Owner needs to ensure that the business users and customers are appropriately engaged in the process. Without an appropriate level of engagement, there is a risk of misunderstanding the business and customer needs.

- Management support

In order to sustain Adaptive planning with Scrum, it becomes important that the culture of the organization understands and respects change. Organizations, where teams go agile but the management thinking does not, run a risk of quickly losing all the benefits from Agile and becoming worse than they were before. Some of the things that managements need to do include

• Provide long term vision, direction and priorities
• Trust and motivate their Teams
• Focus on addition of business value
• Encourage Teams to deliver quality, act on technical debt, enhance engineering practices
• Ensure continuous flow of work
• Minimize non-work related disruptions
• Facilitate removal of impediments outside the control of Teams
• Support the process of learning, inspecting and adapting
• Communicate

Conclusion

Adaptive planning helps Teams handle changes to scope in a continuous manner but may become unsustainable when practiced in isolation. Other practices of Scrum, along with critical management support and understanding are critical for sustain Scrum in an organization.

Explaining the Sprint Budget Chart

The Sprint Budget Chart maps how a team consumes its budget over the length of the sprint relative to the planned budget consumption calculated by ScrumEdge. This chart is based on three variables, the Planned Budget, Budget Used and Actual Completed.

Planned Budget

Once sprint planning is complete and tasks have been assigned to Team Members, ScrumEdge calculates the Planned Budget by assigning a percentage value to each day of the sprint.

Planned Budget:

Planned Budget = Previous Day’s Planned Budget + (100 / Total Days in Sprint)

Example: If a team is working on a 10 day sprint their Planned Budget value will be calculated as follows:

Day 1: 0% + (100 / 10) = 10%

Day 2: 10% + (100 / 10) = 20%

Day 3: 20% + (100 / 10) = 30%

…

Day 10: 90% + (100 / 10) = 100%

Budget Used

The Budget Used line shows what percentage of the the planned budget a team member has used. It is calculated every day by dividing the total number of hours burnt till that day by the total number of hours estimated in the sprint.

Budget Used (Whole Team):

Budget Used = (Total Team Hours Burnt till this Day/ Total Team Hours Estimated in Sprint) * 100

Budget Used (Team Member):

Budget Used = (Total Member Hours Burnt till this Day / Total Member Hours Estimated in Sprint) * 100

Example: If a 2 team plans a sprint where their total task estimates are 100 and burns a total of 12 hours on the first day, and 15 hours on the second day their Budget Used for the first two days will be as follows:

Day 1: (12 / 100) * 100 = 12%

Day 2: (27 / 100) * 100 = 27%

Actual Completed

The Actual Completed line shows the percentage of actual work that is completed in the sprint and is calculated only when a task is completed. The Actual Completed is calculated by dividing the total estimates for completed tasks by the total number of hours that are estimated in the sprint.

Actual Completed (Whole Team):

Actual Completed = (Total Task Estimates for Completed Tasks/ Total Hours Estimated in Sprint) * 100

Actual Completed (Team Member):

Actual Completed = (Total Task Estimates for Completed Tasks for Member/ Total Member Hours Estimated in Sprint) * 100

Example: A team plans a 100 hour, 10 day sprint. 1 task with estimates equaling 7 hours is completed on Day 2 and another with estimates equaling 3 hours on Day 3. On Day 4 a task with estimates equaling 12 hours is complete. The Actual Burn for this sprint would be calculated as follows:

Day 1: (0 / 100) * 100 = 0%

Day 2: (7 / 100) * 100 = 7%

Day 3: (10 / 100) * 100 = 10%

Day 4: (22 / 100) * 100 = 22%

Analyzing the Budget Chart

If used properly the Budget Chart can be a powerful tool. During the course of a sprint, the ScrumMaster can use the Budget Chart to see how much of the plan budget their team uses every day and how much actual work is completed based against the team’s budget consumption.

If the Budget Used line goes over the Planned Budget line, the ScrumMaster should immediately recognize that the team is taking longer to complete tasks than they had estimated. However, this does not mean that the sprint is headed for disaster. It is normal for team members to go over their estimates from time to time. A good ScrumMaster should investigate further to see if this could actually a problem later on in the sprint.

The Actual Completed line is an important indicator of how much work is actually being completed through the sprint. There may be a case that the Budget Used and Planned Budget lines match up perfectly but the Actual Completed line hovers at 0%. This would indicate that the team is using up the time they had planned to spend on tasks, but not actually completing any tasks. It is normal for the Actual Completed line to hover close 0% at the start of the sprint and pick up as the sprint moves forward and tasks are completed.

It is important for ScrumMasters to understand these trends and facilitate the team members in completing committed tasks.

A Cure for Task Estimation Obsession

By Alan Atlas

I often see teams obsess over sprint planning, especially the task estimates. I mean really obsess. Two days of planning for a two-week sprint? Believe it or not, it happens. Even as they complain about spending too much time in scrum meetings, they will insist on arm-wrestling over each and every task estimate. For teams that want to take advantage of their scrum experience and streamline their planning, eliminating task estimates can be an option.

Don’t look so shocked. It is possible. One big caveat, though. For those teams that are new to Scrum, I do not recommend eliminating task estimates until you have established a stable velocity.

Once you have a stable velocity, however, you can use the concepts of story points and velocity to eliminate the need for task estimates in sprint planning. The time you used to spend estimating tasks can then be used more wisely to create working software. I will present a series of steps you can take to gradually eliminate task estimation from your sprint planning process.

Background

Before we get started, let’s quickly recall the reasons why we do the sprint planning things that we do. (We’ll want to make sure we can still meet those needs when we’re done streamlining the process.) We plan the sprint in order to create the following:

1. A shared understanding across the team of the goals of the sprint;
2. A shared understanding of the work that needs to be done during the sprint;
3. An environment in which team members know what to do next (or can find out in seconds);
4. An achievable team commitment to deliver a certain amount of value, expressed as product backlog items; and,
5. A burndown chart that we can use to track our progress through the sprint.

Task estimates most often contribute to goal five above, and for some teams, to goal four. If we can achieve those two items without creating task estimates, then we are free to choose not to use task estimates at all, aren’t we? If you agree, here’s a way to transition away from doing task estimates as part of your sprint planning.

Step 1. Establish Stable Velocity

Use your normal sprint planning process, whether it takes two days or two hours, for each sprint until you can demonstrate stable velocity. (There are many discussions of how to achieve stable velocity out there; it is too large a subject to treat here. For more on agile estimation, I recommend Mike Cohn’s Agile Estimating and Planning.) Make sure your team passes the Nokia test by producing potentially shippable software each sprint (in other words, you’ve proven that you can calculate your velocity correctly). When you have achieved stable velocity, your team will be able to make, and meet, sprint commitments based solely on demonstrated velocity and story point estimates of Product Backlog items. You want to do this anyway as part of having a good scrum implementation, right?

Step 2: Experiment with a Task-Based Burndown

When you think you’re ready to stop estimating tasks, start to use two burndown charts instead of one. Continue to use your normal work-based burndown, which is based on the task estimates from the sprint backlog. Add to it a new burndown chart, which will be based only on the number of tasks in the sprint backlog, regardless of their estimates. The new burndown chart can be called a task-based burndown chart.

Your familiar work-based burndown chart starts with the total of all task estimates for the sprint and, as estimates are updated daily, the burndown continues to reflect the estimated amount of work left in the sprint.  Hopefully it will usually trend down toward zero. Your new, task-based, burndown chart starts instead with the total number of tasks listed for the sprint. Estimates aren’t updated for this chart, and work is burned down when a task is completed (its value on the burndown goes from 1 to 0).  For best results, make sure your task breakdown results in the smallest tasks possible. The task-based burndown chart reflects the estimated total number of tasks left to do in the sprint and not the estimated work effort left. This works best if you have lots of small tasks, typically ones that can be done in a day or less.

Make sure that both burndowns agree and that both give you the same visibility into your progress during the sprint. If you find that the task-based burndown isn’t useful, take a look at Step 3.

Step 3: Shrink Tasks to Improve the Task-Based Burndown

A good, informative task-based burndown chart depends on there being many small tasks to burn down. Conceptually, if you only had one task per PBI on a sprint backlog, you could have a perfectly good work-based burndown chart because the daily updates of the task estimates are given with arbitrary granularity (Now, if your PBIs really have only one task each, it’s indicative that there is a problem with either your stories or your task decomposition). In contrast, the task-based burndown chart for this sprint would be very insensitive on a daily basis, because the tasks would tend to span many days, and progress would not show until a task was completed. The remedy is to make tasks small. A good rule of thumb is that a task should be something that can be completed in a day or less.

Step 4: Stop Doing Task Estimates

When your two burndown charts convey similar information and when you can deliver on velocity-based sprint commitments, you can stop doing task estimates and do away with the work-based burndown. For some teams this will be easy to achieve and for others it could take many sprints. The key to this is to use the idea of velocity correctly. Note that you will still want to be doing the task breakdowns for now. Eliminating them is a different step altogether.

What did we lose when we did away with the task estimates? Task estimates support planning needs four and five from the list above. We still have a burndown chart that we can use to track progress, so we still support goal five.  We have removed the need to support goal four because our team has demonstrated the ability to make commitments based on story point estimates of PBIs and does not need task estimates for validation.

The only thing we might have lost is tangential support for planning need number two. That is, by not asking for estimates, we may have removed some of the mental pressure and motivation to think deeply, look for issues, recall similar efforts, and in general actively bring knowledge and experience to bear on the problem of correctly planning out the tasks. How big a deal is that? The answer to that question is unique to you and your team.

New Feature: The Project Velocity Chart

Velocity is a measurement of how much the team gets done in a given sprint. Velocity is what actually got done in the last iteration not what is planned. Typically, it is measured in story points. Each feature in scrum is a story. A story has points. Points can be anything you come up with.

ScrumEdge, like most scrum teams, doesn’t use story points for stories. Product Owner’s create stories and assign priority and the scrum team selects stories, breaks them down into tasks and assigns estimates to each task, mostly in terms of hours.

We added a new feature called “Project Velocity” which gives team members, Stakeholders and ScrumMasters the ability to view the actual budget burnt by individual team member as well as the whole team for a project. While this information was available for each sprint on the Projects Dashboard, we felt there was a genuine need for a chart showing budget burn for all sprints in a project. This data is mapped on a linear graph so as to see budget burn trends over the course of a project and be accessed by clicking the “Project Velocity” link on the dashboard.

The Velocity Chart below is based on sample data. It shows each sprint in the project on the x-axis and budget used by the sprint team on the y-axis.

 

This particular chart shows that the budget burn over the course of the project is fairly inconsistent (see the sudden dips in Sprint 3 and Sprint 8). As a ScrumMaster I would should take immediate notice of these inconsistencies and investigate why my team’s budget burn varies so much from sprint to sprint.

Did you see any particular trends on your Project Velocity chart? If so, did you figure out the reasons behind the trends?

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