When you pull in the reins, you slow down or stop something that has been a bit out of control. That is what the development team is doing right now. OK, things are not completely out of control, but the current sprint is not working out as well as others.
As you may have noted in my 8/7/09 entry, this sprint is all about rewriting the exam builder and student exam user interfaces. We took on a large list of enhancements and improvements, some of which included some pretty advanced requirements. After some amount of research and trial and error, we have determined that we are going to temporarily drop a few of the sprint tasks for now and come back to them later, in the interest of capping off this sprint. We need to move on to other high priority needs. The main items we are putting on the backburner for now are the support of question groups and the ability for authors to order their questions.
So, what did I learn from this? Well, several things. One, I think we jammed too much into this single sprint. I think we tried to incorporate everything anyone had ever suggested for exams. They are all great ideas, but probably don’t all need to be completed right now. I also think we didn’t hold ourselves accountable for making and meeting estimates. We allowed a number of larger tasks to go un-estimated. We could have also broken up some of our larger tasks and perhaps created initial R&D tasks with limited durations. This would have time-boxed our R&D work or put the go or no-go decision in front of our faces each morning during scrum. Finally, the team has been pretty fragmented during the last few weeks – time off, working remotely, other priorities, etc.
So, as usual, there is a lot to learn from this experience.
Thomas Klassen
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