13. November 2008 07:38 by David in
One of Scrum's great strengths is that it promotes transparency.
The daily stand-up ensures that team members understand what their
peers are working on. It also helps to quickly identify cards
(tasks) that were underestimated or when a particular team member or
pair have become stuck and aren't making progress.
Unfortunately while SCRUM is great at managing the project it can be
more difficult to present the progress to senior management.
For example which of the following metrics should be used as the
public face of the SCRUM.
Originally my team was only using a burn down chart for reporting
but in the last couple of sprints we have added the concept of Sprint
Milestones. A Milestone is
Once all of the cards in the Milestone have been complete we move
the Milestone card from Scheduled to Complete. When reporting a
Milestones progress we list the number of cards completed over the
total number of cards (i.e. 2/6).
The following is an example of the type of information that
is placed in the fortnightly progress report that is presented to my
projects steering committee.
Sprint: 1
Sprint Goal: Integration
between Eagle and Bloomberg
Sprint duration: (3/11 - 22/11)
Milestones:
Bloomberg
market data transformed into Internal schema (3/8) - GREEN
Market data
loaded into Eagle (2/5) - GREEN
Bloomberg
data exported to down stream systems (0/5) - YELLOW
Sprint
complete (5/18)
- YELLOW
Burn down chart:
<image
here...>
Issue List:
<table of
outstanding issues/external factors that are blocking the team>
In many ways you can think of Milestones being an aggregated view
of the user stories and tasks within a sprint. The most
important criteria for determining if an item should be wrapped
within an Milestone is whether it needs to be publicly reported on or
whether it contains integration points with other teams and so needs
to be carefully managed.