The team consists of me (also the Scrum master), Mark the tester, Dave the documentation manager/product guru closed off the first sprint in my group last Friday. I must say, to work just one user story to the “done” criteria is not easy. All of us are working hard to pull through the transition, which is typically 3~4 sprints in literature. I manage to really stick to the Scrum material and only vary the process if we need to work with the external processes (alpha, beta and release processes).
What worked:
- The done criteria is very solid. Having completed a user story with all the items in the criteria checked off really boosts the confidence for both developers and testers.
- The team worked together well and more focused on task, which the progress is easier to gauge than working directly off the whole spec.
What didn’t work:
- User stories are too big. The amount of work involved is not clearly understood resulting in bad estimation.
- Many one-off jobs are not documented as they came in mid sprint and have higher priority than the other sprint backlog items
Overall the team work is fantastic. On record we only completed one user story in the whole sprint (we targeted three) and the perfect hour estimate is so off that the resultant chart did very little in gauging our velocity in the last sprint.
Lots of work left to be done but I’m glad I implemented the process. It has got the rest of the group involved in the project and development decisions are getting made. I’m certainly doing more work but I find it much more interesting now as I’m not coding away in the dark and have limited feedback on what I do.