ScrumU

Monthly Open Meeting

Friday, September 25, 2009
1:30 – 2:30 PM EST
Teleconference

Attendees:
Dick McMullen - Minnesota State Colleges and Universities
Dennis Rush – Wentworth Institute of Technology
Joel Dunn – UNC-Greensboro
Janice Powell – Clemson University
Lynn Secreast and Don Rankins – Appalachian State University
Sweta Thakker – Owens Community College
Benoit McNicoll, Jr – Cornell University
Tracy Weber and Pat Miller – University of Notre Dame
Patrice Major – George Washington University
Greg Huseth and Lori Sundal – Georgia Institute of Technology
Kristine Shannon (Giannelli) – Wake Forest University

Introduction
We extend a special thank you to Pat Miller and Notre Dame for designing and implementing an application to gather questions for discussion.

Three Questions Submitted – so all questions will be discussed.

1. We would like to hear about examples of how schools that have been doing Scrum for a while now do their user stories. How do you gather them, what are the roles in that process?

Expand: didn’t feel as though user stories are being compiled correctly.
Concern: sometimes didn’t feel able to fit every story into the user story format while gathering.

Sometimes there are administrative type stories. Are these really tasks?

Tasks and User Stories are different. We don’t want to try to fit tasks into user stories.

Schools have tracked tasks in backlog but not as user stories. Schools have also tracked tasks in a project separate from sprint backlog.

User Stories:
INVEST for user stories –
• I - Independent
• N - Negotiable
• V - Valuable
• E - Estimable
• S - Small
• T - Testable

2. How are the I.T. leadership roles within a Scrum team balanced? Specifically, the Scrum Master, the Business Analyst and the Product Owner. Can a tech lead function effectively as the Scrum Master? Can a BA also function effectively as a proxy Product Owner? Should the BA be the Scrum Master?

Difficult to find a product owner in higher ed, especially with multiple campuses.
Some are finding using a Business Analyst as a “proxy” seems to work when we have multiple product owners.
Concern: Product owner needs to make decisions. BA is not in a place to make decisions.

On some campuses, the BA is responsible to a group of users to implement. When there are bigger product dev efforts, the product owner becomes more involved and available. For smaller items, it is more difficult to get the attention.

3. What other agile methods have you tried to introduce to complement Scrum (pair programming, TDD, XP, etc)?

Most have found that it has been easier to implement Scrum basics than to implement other agile techniques.

Some schools have tried pair programming. Some schools are hesitant in introducing this model due to culture constraints. Peer reviews seem to be more readily accepted by staff than pair programming.

TDD is interesting but seems to be a considerable shift in the thought process while programming.

Our next meeting will be in October (Date TBD). We will host a virtual guest speaker, Joe Little, with Kitty Hawk Consulting (http://www.kittyhawkconsulting.com/). Joe works closely with Jeff Sutherland, a co-creator of Scrum.

Joe will speak to us and field questions on "Just-In-Time (JIT) Agile Specifications in the Context of Business Value (BV) Engineering."