As far as the sprint goes the burn-down is pretty flat. We are plagued by constant testing churn and the all too regular discovery of new problems. We are discovering more because we are testing more. I just wish we could have tested earlier. Oh well the next sprint is only ever days away.
As far as our scrum goes. How successful have we been? By Jeff Sutherland’s criteria in “The Scrum Papers” I think we have a “Team Scrum” with 2 releases in a year, and we really need to aim for a “Continuous Flow Scrum”. We definitely have involvement from the Product Management team (and most of the company) and we’ve started telling customers about doing 4 releases a year, we’ve just got to deliver! To achieve this we need to become more “Lean”. I think we need to focus on 3 things:
- To test early and be defect free by the end of the sprint
- To be able to go from sprint end to release in a week (currently taking around 6 weeks)
- To ensure that only the functionality the customers really care about is included in release (I think this is currently our biggest waste)
From where we are today I think its a tall order but achievable. Wish us luck!
Diary of a ScrumMaster 