Scrum Ireland

I've just found this blog belonging to me. I am going to work on it. My environment has changed but Scrum has not. I have learned alot since 2008 😅

So the Product Owner has listed the top priority items, the team has estimated how much they can do in a single Sprint, half way into a 3 week Sprint the Burndown Chart shows only 10developer days work out of estimated 30days work, what do you do now as a Team/Scrum Master? At the morning Scrum meeting the ScrumMaster points out that only 10 out of the 30 days are complete, this is what the Sprint Burndown Chart is for, to visualise the problems early on. If it ain't working then try something different. Get some tasks complete by tomorrow's Scrum needs to be the goal. Ask each team member what can be done to hurry along the completion of the items, something is holding up each developer, the developer must be honest and tell what the issue is could be; I haven't been focussed I'm being distracted by queries from outside the group I've had other tasks to do (This is a common one, but then why isn't the task listed in the Sprint backlog?). I don't understand ...

Estimating the time to complete a User Story in SCRUM is done by the development team. I mean the whole development team and not just the individual developer.  This is done using some sort of voting system which allows the development team to contribute their estimate for the User Story. One way to vote is to use a card voting system such as voting cards where each developer votes with a card, there's an online version of this at planningpoker.com .  Whatever medium you choose to use doesn't really matter, the process should be the same, the User Story is studied and the team may later sit together and give their estimation time by voting,if the estimates differ greatly then the reasons why should be discussed.  If a single value cannot be decided on and the estimate is larger than the time for the Sprint then a Spike is required or the User Story should be split into smaller User Stories.   When voting on the estimates of User Stories the Fabbonici number should be used i.e....

SCRUM addons and process templates are available for Visual Studio but of course there are prerequisites such as Team Foundation Server (TFS) which must be installed and in use. 3 of the options available are  http://www.codeplex.com/VSTSScrum ,  http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com/ and eScrum. These provide applications which help manage the SCRUM process more easily.  I've had a quick look at the VSTSSCrum myself, the version I've looked at is Vs01 as my current project is running on Visual Studio 2005. To use go to the url above,  http://www.codeplex.com/VSTSScrum , download version 1. The template itself must be installed on the machine running your TFS, see the Readme.txt in the unzipped files.After installation the of the process template on the server you'll also need to install another client template on the Client, again the Readme.txt explains this. I haven't used this yet. There's also a Project Connector available from codeplex, this might be handy, I th...

The acronyms TFS and VSTS stand for Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Suite or Visual Studio Team Server. All of the above terms are regularly used to represent each other but this is incorrect. The terms are different, hears a brief explanaition below thanks to  Dmytro Lapshyn  : People frequently say "VSTS" when they actually mean "TFS" and this creates some confusion. Use of VSTS to address both "Visual Studio Team Suite" and "Visual Studio Team System" also contributes to the confusion. To clear things up a bit: TFS - the server part of the suite that provides source control, build management and enables teamwork/ALM management Visual Studio Team Suite - the fullest edition of Visual Studio that includes team tools for developers, architects, testers, DB pros and a client license to TFS. Note that Team Explorer needs to be installed separately even though you have the CAL Visual Studio Team System - a more generic term for TFS plu...

Ideal time is the time to complete a task, without taking into account other non-developer tasks such as email, meetings. The total time taken (with the task + email + meetings +....) is known as the Elapsed Time (Real Time). Ideal time is useful when actually trying to get a correct time estimation for tasks. If a developer gives an estimation of 2 days for a task then there are a few factors you must take into account. First of all the 2 days is probably 2 Ideal Days, but this is not of much use if you do not know how much time the developer actually spends on the task (Ideal Time) and how much time they spend in total (Real Time). Lets say the developer has an Ideal Time/Real Time ratio of 1:3 meaning they spend one third of their time actually working on the task and two thirds of the time at meetings, email, browsing, lunch etc. Then you must multiply their 2 day estimate by this factor i.e. 2days x 3 = 6days. So know the Actual time for the task assuming their estimate was accura...