Primer on Agile Project Management and SCRUM

Basics and Breakdowns from the SCEA perspective

Speaker Information

Joe Riego, PMP, Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Product Owner

Sr. Technical Project Manager, SCEA

Working as Project Manager/Business Systems Analyst since 1999

Last 3 years at SCEA

SDLC and IT Project Management

SOX Audit

SDLC Project Management Consulting

Blog and Social Networking Site

http://rcubedprojectmanagement.blogspot.com/

http://pmi-sdchapter.ning.com/

Working Agreements

An attitude of what could be… Suspend what you know

One Conversation at a time

Start and Finish On Time

Stay on Topic

Who are you… and What do you Do?

Name

Role

Organization

Favorite Comic Book Super Hero -

Purpose of the Workshop

To provide a primer on Agile Project Management using SCRUM and to show how Agile and SCRUM address scheduling, planning, estimating, and risk management.

Road Map Overview Agile Project Management SCRUM Project/ Product Planning QA and Fun Time

Opening

Why Agile?

Working Agreements

Intro - Scrum and Agile Project Management

"The Agile Manifesto“

Waterfall and Agile Project Management Bumped Comparison

Iterative Development

What is SCRUM all about?

The SCRUM Machine

Bits and Pieces of SCRUM

The Product Backlog

The Road Map

Velocity

Q and A

So What is Scrum and Agile Project Management?

Not going into any overly specific jargon or canned answers:

Agile is a Project Management Methodology that focuses on

Iteration

Interaction

Transparency

Productized Delivery

SCRUM is:

A meeting and project tracking format used heavily in organizations that practice Agile Project Management

The “Agile Manifesto”

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

Pasted from < http://agilemanifesto.org/ >

Traditional Project Mgmt and SCRUM/Agile Project Mgmt

Traditional Project Management places emphasis on

Milestones

Artifact management

Historical reporting

Minimizing Change

SCRUM/Agile Project Management places emphasis on :

Iteration

Product oriented delivery

Transparency

Extensive “Product Owner” Involvement

Change is expected and incorporated in the process to provide “value add”.

Does not rely heavily on historical or artifact management but rather how much work remains moving forward.

Iterative Development

Developing End to End, a working product with the assumption that improvement and gains can be made throughout the development iterations

The product may not have 100% of the feature set but could be used in production

The general concept is to flesh out and improve over each iteration to meet the requirements/expectation of the business

SCRUM… What’s it all about?

SCRUM is the default process for Agile Project Management and has the following assumptions in its pure form:

Senior Team Members

Dedicated Team

100% Product Owner Involvement

Product Backlog

Sprint Backlog

Daily Meeting

The Burndown

Sprint Planning Meeting

Pigs - Committed

Chickens - Not Committed

The SCRUM Machine Source: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/system/hidden_asset/file/17/ScrumLargeLabelled.png

Pigs and Chickens

The Daily Meeting

15min or less

What are we doing?

What is planned?

What is blocking us?

Take a look at the "Burn Down" or whatever graphical representation of the project the team uses

That’s it. No muss no fuss

The Pitfalls of the Daily!!!

"Lets talk about implementation details" - Good Idea, wrong time

"Logorreha" - The idea is to keep meetings short so the communication used is supposed to be boiled down, too much talking and team members not on your portion of the sprint loose interest and slows morale

"What are we supposed to be doing" - No product owner no sprint is what I say, he's the guy/gal that breaks ties on what has to happen and should be the definitive authority on the project Prioritizing and Deprecating as the process moves forward.

"Scrum Master does that? Right?" – Scrum Master doesn't do very much but act as the alarm for the team and escalate issues and run interference for the development team (Pigs and Chickens)

A common misconception of Agile…

More Common Misconceptions

Not a Silver Bullet

Does not mean no oversight

There is no plan nor a schedule

It’s easy - its actually pretty hard

It can’t scale

Teams Self Manage so that means they don’t need managers

The Burn Down

This is the Graphical Representation of Agile it measures velocity of completing a sprint.

It looks to work remaining as the metric as opposed to how much is done.

Seems counter intuitive but from a line perspective it allows the resource to see what is remaining and how much its going to take as opposed to looking at the Gantt and seeing what was done and have no idea how much its going to take given the current time frame.

The Product Backlog

Analogous to WBS

Continually Pruned and managed

Priority

Business Value

Size

The Roadmap

Fuzzy Estimates the Further we get out

The Product Backlog stretched over time

Thematic and High level

Velocity – When will we be done?

Planning Points

Complexity, Effort, Difficulty

How many Points can Be done over an Ite.ration/Sprint = a teams velocity

How many points are in the Backlog

Given current Velocity the remaining work in back log will take X# of iterations.

What about time? – Time Boxing = 1 month = 160h no matter what. Or whatever iteration duration.

Agile Resources

Rally Dev – www.agilecommons.com

Blog - The Agile Executive – www.theagileexecutive.com

Blog – Agile Game Development – www.agilegamedevelopmen.com

Mountain Goat Software – www.mountaingoatsoftware.com

Agile (Like Ninjas) Project Management Group – www.pmi-sdchapter.ning.com

Question 1:

Are Unplanned items usually unexpected production support related issues? What else is unplanned?

Well from the SCEA perspective we prioritize the production issues and weigh them against the constraints to hitting the sprint as negotiated by the product owner.

If the product owner says this product support issue trumps a feature; the issue gets the appropriate development effort and the feature gets pushed to the product backlog for reallocation to a future sprint.

Remember because of the Transparency (in this case finite resources and product owner involvement) Delivery expectations match what the product owner wants.

Note : As soon as the Product Owner assigns the task to a sprint and gives it a priority it stops being unplanned.

Question 2:

If we determine part of the way into a sprint that existing code (Created before the Sprint) needs refactoring, should that be included as an unplanned item

In the sprint the, User Story should take into account potential unplanned tasks and reflect it in the Complexity Points (If you use them).

This should at the very least be brought up as a blocker in the Daily for discussion on inclusion into the sprint and requiring Product Owner resolution.

Question 3:

If we start work on a story and realize the initial estimate of the story was way off, do we modify the total number of points in the sprint?

I wouldn't.

This should be brought up in the daily that the sprint as it currently sits is in jeopardy and that the product owner needs to re-assess the Sprint as a whole and reprioritize the Tasks/User Stories approriately.

Question 4:

If we start work on a sprint and the product owner decides he/she doesn’t want a story anymore do we modify the number of points in the sprint?

Yes.

However it's been my experience that the Product Owner never wants to take things off without adding more. The reason is typically to assign more work.

Question 5: