RSSMy first Scrum planning
Sep 02
Today we had our first Scrum Planning.
Just a few days ago, my client came to me and said: “We need you guys to make our website accessible” and he passed down a list of requirements from W3C. Very nice list I thought and I thought: “Ok let’s do our first SCRUM using this as a product backlog”. It’s not big but it’s not too small either especially because the client’s website is pretty big.
The first thing we did was start the Sprint planning.
Start time: 1345
Finish time: 1810
Attendees: Kevin, Nic, Cherry, Ronan, Kathie, Bill. 2 members could not join because they were busy on other projects.
First thing, set the Sprint Objective. After some discussions, nobody could really come up with something and we just wrote: Implement one full page of requirements… lol
Second thing was to review all the requirements one by one so everyone gets a good understanding… wow that took long time, and it was difficult.
After that, we went through the list of requirements again and we played poker to do the estimate. That again took a long time. The conversation too often diverted in some technical considerations of how it was going to be done.
Finally, we drew the line and decided how much we would accomplish for this sprint.
First observations:
- if possible team members should review all requirements beforehand
- the product owner needs to prepare very well designed stories: as {user type}, I wish to {task details} in order to accomplish {objective}
- Next time I think we will all review the requirements first before the meeting, and we will go straight to planning poker
- Some lower priority tasks were not estimated because too much time was already spent and we could not afford to continue the meeting any longer
- Planning poker is excellent. It helped team members get a better understanding of the tasks, as well as uncover misunderstanding leading to diverging estimation, as well as help build commitment in the whole team
We decided to push the Task Planning to the next morning.