Book review: Scrum 360

Name: Scrum 360 - Um guia completo e prático de agilidade

Author: Jorge Audy
Languages available: Portuguese

Personal Review: This book is a collection of small texts published originally at the author's official website. As expected, the language is informal and light; it's like you're talking with the author and he is sharing his knowledge with you. In this book you can learn a lot about what is working with Scrum in practice. The author has lots of years of experience in the agile world.

One of my favourite chapters is the very first one. It brings a discussion about who we are, what we do and why, and how we are perceived by others. In the agile world we work as a team: there is no way to be successfull if we don't know how to combine efforts with each other and work in equilibrium. He mentions that "being happy at work is to colaborate and contribute with the construction of a winner team, grow up, see your carrer launch by merits on the company that you are working and that pays your salary." (free translation). This full text is available (only in Portuguese) here.

In this same chapter, he brings up the Individualism versus Collectivism topic. The text (in Portuguese only) is available here. I absolutely agree with that:

"In an agile team, there are no space for superstars; if you want to be the center of attention or continuously put someone from the team at focus, good or bad, review your concepts. The goal is the balance of the collective, knowing that ideas and good initiatives are opened to everybody, the same way as participate and collaborate with continuous improvement" (free translation).

In the subsequent chapters, the author introducts the Scrum method and talk about its roles, ceremonies and artifacts, explaining each one in detail. Also the topics of vision, user stories, acceptance criteria and MVP (minimum viable product) are approached. A very nice gathering of tips can be found at Chapter 8: Continuos  improvement. He presents the most important factors of Sprint zero, Planning, Daily, Board, Review and Retrospective. For example, the 4 tips about the Daily ceremony: (free translation)

1. Total focus on sprint delivery (risks and opportunities)

2. Assertivity (each one should prepare: what happened of good and bad)

3. What to say and not to? An abstract of the things that are relevant to the sprint

4. After 3 dailys with no decisions, risks, opportunity, look under the mat.

At last, the topic is knowledge management. For me, the most interesting part of this chapter are the tips for making good presentations. In short, I think that this book is worth reading and I'd recomend to Scrum learners, specially beginners in the agile world.

Price and where to buy:

1) Saraiva Bookstore: R$ 44,90

http://www.saraiva.com.br/scrum-360-um-guia-completo-e-pratico-de-agilidade-9247659.html

2) Cultura Bookstore: R$ 44,90

http://www.livrariacultura.com.br/p/scrum-360-um-guia-completo-e-pratico-de-98383591

Everything you always wanted to know about the Iteration Burndown

There are several techniques that can be used to track team progress during an Agile Iteration. One of the most popular ones is the Iteration Burndown Chart. It's a simple chart, however it has the power to provide quite a bit of information. In general, the most interested in the burndows are the team's Product Owner (PO) and Scrum Master (SM). Also, it can be used for anyone else who is interested in Sprint outcomes, as Project/Product Managers and stakeholders.

Components

In the burndown chart we usually put the period of time at the X-axis and the hours of work at the Y-axis. This way, you can find out how many hours the team still needs to work in order to complete the Sprint (green bars) and also how many hours of work have been delivered (yellow bars).

This chart above is an example of what would be the "perfect" sprint of the "perfect" team. The velocity of delivery is consistent throughout the sprint. In the middle of the sprint we have exactly 50% of the planned work delivered. In the end of the sprint, everything was already delivered and the Sprint finishes as a success. Of course, this is a perfect balanced sprint and it's not expected that real teams work like this.

One more example

Let's take a look at another example. This is a situation where the team completed the sprint successfully, but there are things to improve for certain. Observe that the velocity was not uniform throughout the sprint. There was a very small amount of work delivered on day 2 and a big amount at day 3. Besides that, between days 14 and 15 there were absolutely no work delivered. Two things could have happened here: Either the tool wasn't updated appropriately or the team rushed to finish the sprint on time.

Sprint failure

A final example of a failed sprint: about 23% of the planned work was not finished. The velocity of delivery was uniform, but it wasn't enough to finish all the work on time. The team must adjust their velocity in order to prevent failures on next sprints.

At last, let's take a look at this text from the Official Scrum Guide:

"Various projective practices upon trending have been used to forecast progress, like burndowns, burn-ups, or cumulative flows. These have proven useful. However, these do not replace the importance of empiricism. In complex environments, what will happen is unknown. Only what has happened may be used for forward-looking decision-making."

In other words: trending graphs are useful and can help your team to understand whats going on in the current sprint and the chance that it might fail or succeed; however, you should use them with caution, specially when dealing with a complex system or even maybe a complex team, where team members are joining and leaving the team constantly and the team has not yet achieved a mature level.