Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Follow-up on the Scrum Practitioners meeting Sept 7th

To follow up on our first meeting in the Scrum Practitioners South of Sweden network;

I don't intend to recap all the discussions and conclusions on the meeting, but rather I just wanted to briefly list the major topics discussed as I recall.

The meeting was held as planned at Labs2 in Lund with a total of 8 participants including Mathias Thinsz (Product Manager & Scrum Product Owner at Labs2) who was our host.

Mathias went through and explained the major parts of Labs2's Scrum implementation. It seems to me that they have a very solid and healthy view on how they development software. It's a clean and well-thought-through implementation of Scrum. A great example on how well Scrum works.

Related topics discussed were;
* How Labs2 use JIRA and a custom developed web application for managing the backlog
* How and when Labs2 estimate their work in the backlog, and how they use the storypoints unit
* How Labs2 has divided their development organization
* How and why Labs2 have divided their development time into fixed-length iterations
* How Mathias (as Scrum Product Owner) prepares for a new sprint and who is involved when
* How and why Labs2 use "Sprint Goals" as a major tool for directing development inside a sprint

There were tons of other interesting questions and discussions as well, but too much for me to go into here.

The general feeling, in my understanding, was that the meeting was interesting and inspiring and everyone had a lot of questions and topics which they wanted to continue discussing.
The number of participants was optimal and the length of the meeting as well. Hence; my conclusion is that there is a definate interest for meeting again and that the next meeting should be in the same format.

I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who joined and not least Mathias Thinsz and Labs2 for the openess with how they work!

Friday, September 4, 2009

Mon Sep 09: Meeting Scrum Practitioners South of Sweden

On Monday the 7th of September 17:00-19:00 we're a bunch of people meeting at Labs2's office in Lund (Sweden :)) to discuss how Labs2 are working with Scrum. Anyone intersted in joining and sharing experiences is welcome.

Join the LinkedIn group "Scrum Practitioners South of Sweden" and post your interest if you want to join the meeting.

My idea with this is to get software professionals in the Öresund region to meet informally, network, and not least share experiences and help eachother improve our way of working with agile software development. Meetings will be hosted by a different group member each time, and the discussion theme will vary from meeting to meeting.

See you there!

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Scrum but... test

This has been around for some time, but if you haven't taken it already then do it. It's a good way to compare yourself to others and help emphasize your points of improvement.

Go to the Scrumbut test!

I just took the test and my team currently scores 7.1 out of 9.