Last week at the Online Scrum Master Summit, a question came up on the Definition of Done (DoD). Can the devs or QA have a different DoD to the PO? The Definition of Done has been part of the Scrum Guide for many years. With the 2020 Scrum Guide the DoD became the commitment to the Increment. Until Product Backlog Items meet the DoD they are not part of the increment and therefore it’s not possible to ship or even review them. ...
Scrum is a timeboxed framework. We have sprints of fixed length (i.e. two weeks) and during the Sprint Planning event the team decides what will be completed during this time. If additional work comes up it would ideally be put into the product backlog and pulled into a future sprint once prioritized by the product owner, and given the team’s capacity for this work. However, it is not uncommon that we have requests which cannot be delayed until future sprints (i.e. 3rd level/production support). I will describe an approach on how these can be dealt with below. ...
This afternoon, Wednesday 18th November, the latest version of the Scrum Guide1 has been released. The first update in over three years and there are quite a few changes. Scrum Inc. ran a 3-hour Zoom call2 to introduce the new guide, and here are a few of my takeaways from that call. The first thing is that the guide has been reduced from 18 pages to 13. There were a lot of unclear descriptions around Product Backlog Items, Retro Items and Sprint cancellations that have all gone. This reduction appears to be an attempt to open up Scrum to a wider audience, not just IT projects, which was JJ Sutherland’s reiterated in his takeaway. ...
With the world working remotely, I have managed to join a few meetup sessions which I would not normally have access to. A couple of days ago I was talking with James Coplien1, who along with the likes of Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, Grady Booch, founded the the Hillside group2. Inspired by the architect Christopher Alexander3 work in pattern languages they have been running PLoP (Pattern Languages of Programming) writers workshops. With Jeff Sutherland4 and several other authors, Coplien has documented and collected patterns related to how Scrum teams organise and create value into a scrum book5. Most of these patterns are available online6. It includes all your favourites, from Sprint Goal and Daily Stand-up, to some more guild like patterns, i.e. Birds of a Feather (where similar roles, i.e. BAS or QAs, from different teams get together to share knowledge). ...