Thursday, July 8, 2010

Scrum

This has nothing to do with rugby. I had a crash course in project management today. Specifically the style of project management used here in the office. Scrum, which is not an acronym, is a project management system designed for agile programming and development.

There's a simple hierarchy, but basically the user stories are broken down into small requirements. These are stacked, then there's a meeting. Everyone decides to do some work, implement some feature, after that there is a two week or month long sprint. Every morning everyone meets for ten minutes and announces what they did yesterday and what they'll do today. The Scrum Master makes sure there are no obstacles in the programmers way. Then at the end of the sprint, everyone meets up again and demonstrates their program with the implemented features. Then they'll have another meeting and go into another sprint to implement more of the requested features or test it or return to the customer or whatever.

It sounds different to the methods I've been taught in lectures, though it seems to be more able to deal with fussy customers, as well as keeping everyone focused. I'm being assigned to a project next week so I'll get to have my first Scrum meeting. I'm not sure what's being expected of me, but the idea of having set tasks for each day actually sounds great.

2 comments:

  1. Scrums are good until you get to the third morning in a row where you have to go "yea ive not finished yet"

    If they are done correctly they are good.

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  2. You should make smaller tasks, or allocate more hours to your task. :)

    I ended up putting down nearly double all of my estimates, just to make sure I'll get everything done.

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