Emerging and Converging

Last public Certified ScrumMaster course for 2009

Rowan Bunning — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 01:16:00 GMT

Well, the end of the year is coming very soon now. There's only one more opportunity to gain certification as a Certified ScrumMaster on a public course in Australia this year. The details are as follows.

Date:	Thursday Dec 3 - Friday Dec 4
Venue:	Level 24, Cliftons,
	288 Edward Street,
	Brisbane
	Cliftons Brisbane info
Registration	Course Description and Registration

Act now to avoid disappointment. Registration close this week.

Certified Scrum Product Owner course coming up in Sydney

Rowan Bunning — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:42:00 GMT

The year's final opportunity to gain or consolidate Product Owner skills is coming up very soon. I will be delivering a Certified Scrum Product Owner course in Sydney on November 17-18.

The course will be substantially updated to incorporate some of the latest tools and activities that I have learned about during recent trips to the USA and Germany.

Remaining places on the course are strictly limited to a very low number so if you or a colleague are interested, please act now to register via the course listing at the Scrum Alliance website.

Kicking ScrumBut

Rowan Bunning — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 09:57:00 GMT

I arrived back from the European Scrum Gathering in Munich, Germany less than one week ago. I brought back a custom-printed rugby ball as a souvenir from the conference courtesy of primary sponsor VersionOne (and a quick pass from Scrum Alliance President, Tom Mellor).

As well as replays of a couple of the best sessions I went to at Agile 2009, I attended some excellent sessions on social objects and Product Owner tools for which presentation slides are yet to be made available. Sessions that I enjoyed for which slides are currently available are...

A case study of Scrum implementation in a games company: Harvey Wheaton - Growing Self-Organising Teams
Risk in a Scrum envirnonment: Mark Summers - Redefining the Traditional View of Risk
Scrum for lawyers: Regina Mullen - Raising the Bar, Iteratively

I delivered a presentation on day 1 of the conference with the title "Kicking ScrumBut" on the topic of ScrumBut anti-patterns that I have observed on a variety of Scrum projects along with advise as to how to avoid such situations. It was similar to the "Agile Mistakes" presentation (PDF) that I delivered at the Agile Australia conference the Friday before but substantially extended since I had twice the ammount of time. We also found a little time at the end to discuss a couple of the most significant ScrumButs that members of the audience had seen.

My presentation slides available below. As usual, if you have any questions or comments, please post them below.

Kicking ScrumBut

View more presentations from rowanb.

Out of the closet at Agile Australia this week!

Rowan Bunning — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:54:00 GMT

The inaugural Agile Australia conference is looming large and coming fast - this week in fact! Late announcements include talks by Scrum Trainer and author Jean Tabaka as well as master of controversy, Dave Thomas. Whilst I expect their sessions to be top-notch, what is even more interesting to me is that we are set to hear from many large corporates and innovative Australia companies who are speaking about their agile transitions publicly for the first time. These include Westpac, BT Financial, Swann Insurance, Cochlear, Pickles Auctions, realestate.com.au. A real coming of age for Agile in Australia as well as a coming out of the closet for some perhaps!

I'm talking about "Agile mistakes and how to avoid them" - a session that will go under the (somewhat more punchy) name of "Kicking ScrumBut" at the Scrum Gathering in Munich at the start of the following week. No rest for the wicked!

I hope to see you at Agile 2009. For details see: agileaustralia.com. If you are interested in a special deal on your registration, please contact me.

Metaphor used to explain Scrum in Brisbane

Rowan Bunning — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 06:59:00 GMT

I had a lot of fun in Brisbane two weeks ago exploring Scrum with an interesting and diverse class. We had a significant number of participants from two Queensland Government agencies as well as a few from private companies. One topic of interest to the former was how Scrum can work in a PRINCE2 environment and we managed to find a little time to discuss that.

Particularly memorable for me was a particularly creative presentation from one of the teams at the close of the course. They say that metaphor is a powerful communication tool and the team used this to the full by explaining Scrum using the metaphor of a boat cruise. The traditional project approach was characterised as a big cruise ship packed with people. Slow moving and difficult to maneuver. This contrasted with the Scrum approach in which a small speedboat took a small number of passengers at a time to various islands. Using the Scrum approach, the journey was flexible and the decision could be made to visit different islands or points of interest. Such decisions were arrived at the end of Sprints based on a review with passengers (stakeholders) of the journey to that point.

According to the presenters, the speed boats would zip between the points of most interest to the passengers whilst the monolithic old cruise ship was destined to suffer a fate similar to the Titanic! I'm thinking that the speed boats could start setting out sooner than the big cruise ship and would be able to start delivering value and happy passengers to their destination sooner.

So... could Scrum be useful for tour operators?! At the very least, it was a nice metaphor that made for a very memorable presentation.

Well done to everybody who contributed to what turned out to be an entertaining course. All the best with Scrum!

Seventeen Sydney CSMs explore self-organisation

Rowan Bunning — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:24:00 GMT

I had the pleasure of training a Certified ScrumMaster class at the University of Sydney at the end of last week. I felt a really positive energy from the group who appeared to really enjoy the group exercises. The photo to the right shows the class holding hands to figure out the flight path of the balls in one such exercise: the Ball Point Game.

Holding the course at the University provided us the opportunity to do a 'site visit' to the team room used by and agile development team at the University. We had a look at some burn-downs and status indicators on a plasma screen and a CSM from one of my previous classes was good enough to talk us through their tools and processes. Thanks very my to the University staff involved for showing us their workspace.

Another highlights for me was the 'Twister-style' self-organisation exercise involving a large group of 10 which unravelled so rapidly and fluidly when the team collaborated on it that I wished I had a video camera at hand to capture it! I think that such exercises explain the dynamics involved in self-organisation and contrast it with traditional Big Design Up-Front (BDUF) much more effectively that words can.

We discussed a number of characteristics of self-organisation in the debrief but I would like to expand on that with some additional characteristics of self-organisation that I have observed when watching the exercise unfold.

A shared goal - the whole team has a common goal around which to self-organise. No pulling in different directions (well perhaps sometimes literally but not metaphorically).
Empowerment - the team is empowered to decide on its actions and shape its own destiny.
Collaboration - No refusing to help out because "the hole is in your side of the boat" because "we're all in the same boat".
Multiple interactions - solving the problem involves a large number of interactions amongst participants. In this exercise, these interactions are both verbal and physical.
Seeing the whole - the team operates in an environment of transparency and the whole team has visibility on its progress and the state of the whole solution and can make decisions to govern the whole team outcome on that basis.
Worker insights - the people at the 'coal face' able to understand the problem and make tactical execution decisions more effectively that outside analysts.
Distributed intelligence - whilst the 'traditional' (BDUF) attempt has the Project Manager and a small number of design consultants attempt to 'mastermind' a solution, the self-organising approach leverages the intelligence of all team members.
Interchangeable leadership - there is no one leader through the whole exercise, different people take the initiative to step forward and take leadership at different points in time - usually when an individual has an idea about the next move to try.
Distributed control - there is no single locus of control, control is distributed amongst team members.
Idea generation - important in a complex environment, team members actively generate and communicate new ideas, quickly decide which to take, execute a move and inspect.
Positive and negative feedback - team members collaboratively decide when to do more of a certain move and when to stop, inspect and decide in another move.
Experimentation and learning - sometimes the group tries a move that doesn't work out and responds by identifying this, unwinding the move and trying a different approach.

The self-organisation exercise also provides nice demonstration of:

The Art of the Possible - the 'knotty problem' the team is challenged to solve looks virtually impossible and results in the BDUF attempt to fail due to 'analysis paralysis'. The empowered team realises that there are moves that are possible and by taking these, the team raises the visibility of new possibilities.
Emergent design and learning by doing - we come up with the design as we go and validate and revise it in incremental steps. Interestingly, in this example, teams usually conclude that designing the solution convincingly up-front would actually take more than getting in and solving it with the design emerging as we go.

There are lot of important Scrum concepts wrapped up in that one exercise and a lot to discuss in the debrief.

Well done to everyone involved and thanks for teaching me a thing or two about self-organisation through your very proficient demonstration!

Back from Agile Adventures in New Zealand and the USA

Rowan Bunning — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:44:00 GMT

Well, I must apologise... it has been a long time between posts here. You can't say that I have been idle more generally though. I have been out of Australia and on the road for almost 6.5 weeks. First in New Zealand for the second half of July and then the USA for all of August.

In New Zealand I delivered 5 training courses involving over 100 participants in addition to two speaking engagements! Thanks very much to my good friends at Equinox for pulling it all together. If you are in New Zealand and interested in Agile / Scrum, you can find the Agile course schedule on the Equinox site. This includes a wide variety of offerings from introductory to advanced level and covering all Scrum project participants. Equinox also offer Agile consulting services to assist you beyond the classroom as I also offer in Australia.

My time in the USA was also Agile-focused - this time spending time with some of the world's most recognised names in Agile and Scrum. Highlights...

"Effective User Stories", "Certified ScrumMaster" and "Agile Estimating and Planning" courses - with Mike Cohn in Boulder, Colorado;
"Passionate Product Owner" course with Agile User Experience guru Jeff Patton in Salt Lake City, Utah; and
Agile 2009 conference - 1 week with approx. 1,300 members of the global agile community in Chicago, Illinois.

This was a very valuable trip as it helps me to ensure that my services continue to incorporate the latest thinking of the world's foremost Scrum trainers and practitioners.

If you didn't make it to Agile 2009, there's no reason to miss out entirely. Presentation slides from many of the Agile 2009 sessions are available via the conference program and I'll be posting my thoughts about certain sessions here very soon.

Sydney scores first Australian CSM course of the 2009-10 financial year

Rowan Bunning — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:13:00 GMT

A new financial year of Scrum training in Australia kicked off last week with a public CSM course in Sydney. Numbers were up on the previous week with 11 participants putting a big effort into their Certification Exercises and being awarded the CSM accreditation. Almost all participants were currently or expecting to soon play the role of ScrumMaster and several were PMPs or PRINCE2 Practitioners.

Partly because of the ScrumMaster-heavy audience, we spent a good deal of day 1 discussing the ScrumMaster role and techniques for avoiding "command and control". Another change is that I have recently added a "Daily Scrum from Heaven" role-play exercise to the course to compliment and contrast with the "Daily Scrum from Hell". We had a good deal of fun with these exercises on this course. I'm always impressed at how readily participants can slip into character and ad-lib quite believable dysfunctional and functional behaviours.

The self-organisation exercise was particularly impressive this time around with the self-organising team solving the problem in an unbelieveable 15 seconds after the Big Design Up Front approach got nowhere. Whilst playing the Ball Point Game, the group came up with a lot of good process improvement ideas and tried one of the most effective configurations that I have seen in the last sprint to score a very good number of points for a team of that size.

Just as the course was wrapping up we were visited by Lachlan Heasman - convenor of the Sydney Scrum User Group - who gave everyone a run-down on the user group and how to get involved.

All the best with Scrum everyone and I hope to see you at a user group meeting in the not-too-distant future!

Highly Productive CSM Course in Australia's Swine Flu Capital

Rowan Bunning — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:09:00 GMT

Contrary to my initial expectations, the class for Australia's last CSM course for the 2008-09 financial year turned out to be small. It was made smaller still by a suspected case of swine flu. Melbourne has borne the brunt of the epidemic in Australia with 1,560 confirmed cases at the time of writing. I would like to wish everyone who is suffering symptoms in that city a swift recovery to full health.

The course was held in what is now one of Australia's most environmentally sustainable office buildings: 500 Collins Street. You can find some key points on the building at the greener buildings site. Interestingly, increased productivity is cited as a major benefit of refurbishment. That certainly aligns well with what are seeking to achieve through Scrum.

To quote the case study...

A productivity study commissioned by Sustainability Victoria found that the refurbished office provided:

39% reduction in average sick leave days per employee per month

44% reduction in the monthly average cost of sick leave

9% increase in the typing speed of secretaries

7% increase in lawyers’ billings ratio, despite a 12% decline in the average monthly hours worked.

Perhaps there's a future Scrum case study in the hyper-productivity achievable through effective application of Scrum in work environments that also help to increase staff health and wellbeing! Just a thought.

The size of the class meant that discussions during breaks tended to involve the full class in something of an extension to the course focused on specific topics of interest. We were also able to find time to drill into options topics such as Agile Contracts, Scaling Scrum and some basic guidelines for distributed development.

Amongst the participants last week we had a good deal of prior experience with Extreme Programming (XP) and Feature Driven Development (FDD). This made for some interesting and mutually beneficial discussions. I learned some things too and came away with pointers to several useful references.

Towards the end of the course we played the Ball Point Game which saw me roll up my sleeves and join in for a change. Following that the Certification Exercise saw a very small number of people generate and present outstanding presentations in very little time. Whilst some may claim that the building contributed, I think we can attribute the exceptionally high level of productivity evident purely to the enthusiasm and focus of the participants.

Well done guys and all the best with Scrum!

First Canberra CSM course at Old Parliament House

Rowan Bunning — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 05:40:00 GMT

It seems quite fitting that the Old Parliament House was the venue for the first ever Certified ScrumMaster course in Australia's national capital which concluded yesterday. On a sunny winter's morning we assembled on the spot on which one of Australia's most dramatic political events - the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam - was announced in 1975. The above photo was taken a short time later just across the road so as to get more of the building in-shot.

It was great to involved with another Federal Government agency embracing Scrum during this in-house course. A topic of particular relevance to this organisation was not how to scale Scrum up, but rather how to scale it down to very small teams of only two or three members. After discussing a number of alternative options, we arrived at a solution that appears promising and is more in-line with Scrum's guideline of optimal team size being between 5 and 9.

Our discussion of the Product Owner role brought to light the fact that some participants had had project experiences involving someone playing a role similar to the Scrum Product Owner. Apparently these projects had proved to be particularly successful.

We had a particularly memorable moment during the self-organisation exercise. Somehow the class managed to get into a particularly difficult-looking set of knots. It did not appear to even be possible to solve the problem for a while and I was on the verge of calling it off. The team did not give up however - even after trying some experiments that appeared to make the situation worse rather than better. The self-organising team encouraged each other on and collaborated effectively to solve a problem that appeared to be unsolvable. Well done everyone.

Agile Hitler

Rowan Bunning — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:18:00 GMT

Thanks to the guys at the Agile Canberra SIG meeting last night for pointing this one out. An example of how not to behave as a ScrumMaster perhaps!

Note: a course language warning applies for the subtitles.

Sydney software exporter gets ready for Scrum

Rowan Bunning — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 10:00:00 GMT

I had the pleasure of training both product managers and project managers at a highly successful Sydney-based company who export software to over 50,000 customers in over 160 countries. It was exciting and affirming for me to find that everyone who participated in the Certified Scrum Product Owner and Certified ScrumMaster classes were fully supportive of Scrum and couldn't wait to get stuck into using across as many of their projects as possible.

Feedback from the Product Owners indicated that user stories are a big step forward as a tool for discussing features with customers and orchestrating development work. There was also considerable interest in techniques for prioritisation and calculating Return on Investment.

We had a lot of fun on the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course with the group exercises. The self-organisation exercise was particularly impressive with the team of 8 collaboratively unravelling their knotty software problem in less than 20 seconds! The Ball Points Game (pictured) hit the mark with the actual velocity matching estimates as well as with the teamwork.

We finished the CSM course with up with a certification exercise that the participants customised to answer real implementation questions direct from their own organisation's environment. I think we all left the class with a lot of new ideas about how to benefit from Scrum. One ScrumMaster actually reported some return on investment from day 1 when he adjusted the way he facilitated Daily Scrums at the start of day 2 of the course with very pleasing results.

Congratulations everyone and all the best with your Scrum implementation!

Agile in Government Paper

Rowan Bunning — Wed, 20 May 2009 11:36:00 GMT

I recently blogged about Adrian Royce's paper on Agile in Government which won the best industry paper award at the ASWEC 2009 conference. We reviewed this paper this evening at the Agile Canberra SIG meeting in Canberra - a group for which this paper is particularly pertinent. For those who have not picked it up already, you can find an electronic copy of the paper here.

Melbourne CSMs Score Big Points

Rowan Bunning — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:16:00 GMT

Congratulations to the twelve new Certified ScrumMasters in Melbourne who did a great job with their team exercises on day 2 of the course. Perhaps inspired by the twister-style self-organisation exercise, the group found a novel way to play the ball point game that saw them consistently achieve a velocity of over 100 balls passed through 11 pairs of hands in 2 minutes! It was impressive watch. After a lot of good questions and discussion on day one, the Planning Poker and User Story Splitting, Daily Scrum and Certification exercises provided an action-packed second day.

Agile Contracts proved to be a hot topic for a second time in a week indicating that it is time for me to to adapt the CSM slide deck to incorporate this material. Other questions focused on how to identify the right Product Owner. Can the PO be on the supplier side or should it really be someone within the customer organisation? Do they really need to be a domain expert? What if they don't have time for everything that the standard PO role can involve? What if the PO is not fulfilling the role adequately? Lots of good questions there. Perhaps some good topics for future blog posts too. Stay tuned.

Our new Sydney CSMs have Rhythm!

Rowan Bunning — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 06:39:00 GMT

Congratulations to the seven new Australian Certified ScrumMasters whose hand-eye co-ordination was tested on Thursday!

With our numbers swelled by a few additional participants from the University of Sydney, we had a lot of fun with the twister-style Self-Organisation and Ball Points exercises at the start of Day 2. According to participants, these were valuable as they helped them to experience and understand the though processes involved in Scrum projects.

We played 6 iterations of the Ball Point Game and almost immediately the team fell into a strong rhythm - several balls leaving and arriving in hands in-sync as can be seen in the above photo. It was actually quite mesmerising to watch. The team found that it could readily achieve around 50 ball points per iteration but finding an optimisation sufficient to break through the 60 point barrier was a real challenge.

The group had a lot of questions which invoked some interesting conversations. Scrum's practices of prioritisation, iterative planning and timeboxing proved crucial in getting through the core material and additional topics of most interest by the end of day 2. When under pressure to get lots of things done, use Scrum!

We finished the course with a review of Agile contracting models. For those interested in this topic, the following web resources are worth having a look at.

If you are interested in Agile Contracts AND happen to live in the Sydney area, you may wish to attend the next Sydney Scrum User Group meeting on May 6 for which the topic of the meeting is exactly this.

Scrum in Government Paper wins Award

Rowan Bunning — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:59:00 GMT

A hearty congratulations to Adrian Royce who won the Best Industry Paper award at the 20th Australian Software Engineering Conference on Friday of last week. The title of the winning paper is: Agile in Government: Successful on-time delivery of Software.

Adrian is now with the Queenland Department of Natural Resources and Water but wrote his paper about his experience at the Queensland Department of Housing. For those who have observed the struggles of the (courageous) people who have tried make a success of Scrum in certain Government organisations, Adrian's achievement is all the more meaningful and perhaps add credence to the theme of the conference "Agile, the New Mainstream".

Here are a few key points and lessons learned from Adrian's paper. Note that I have done some rewording and added extra words to the lessons learned to clarify some of these points.

Key Points

The waterfall model used previously did not suit rapidly changing business requirements from new policy directions.
Scrum was successfully used within PRINCE2 as the overarching project management methodology mandated by the QLD Government IT Office.
A pilot Scrum project at Housing was very successful.
Housing has now be running Scrum projects for over two years.
All software projects have been delivered on or ahead of agreed time frames.
ICT staff became motivated about delivering value to the client.
ICT staff morale increased which led to excellent staff retention.
Positive feedback has been received from business units across the department indicating that usage of Scrum has been a success.

Overall Lessons Learned

Agile Project Leader - a dedicated ScrumMaster must be considered
Focus is directly on team - for decisions, solutions and recommendations
Sprint '0' is a necessity - to set the foundation for further sprints
Do not impose - techniques or speed of adoption
Keep productive teams together - teams that have bonded and are delivering are valuable
Human interaction over technology - keep tools simple
Measure, measure, measure - to help convince senior management
Focus on quality - include a tester and encourage TDD, refactoring, frequent builds
Educate the client - spend as much time educating the business clients as the ICT staff

Canberra more than doubles Australia's CSPOs

Rowan Bunning — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:43:00 GMT

A Scrum course with a view - that's what 15 of us experienced on Monday and Tuesday. The class was held on the edge of Lake Burley Griffin in the nation's capital. The room itself contained not one, but six video screens that could be rolled up to reveal the vista across the lake to a line-up of national institutions including the National Library, Questacon, the High Court and Parliament House.

I believe that this was just the second Product Owner course ever to be held in Australia. Perhaps even more significantly, overnight it has more than doubled the number of CSPO's in the country from 10 to 24! That's not a lot compared with our 738 CSMs. Hopefully this is just the start of a lot more CSPOs to come. The current tally of Certified Scrum Product Owners globally is just over 2,250 compared with the rather impressive total of 52,000 Certified ScrumMasters!

It was an interesting two day exploration of product ownership with a number of participants having significant experience in exactly this sort of work. We had a good deal of fun with the visioning and role modelling exercises which brought out some very interesting business ideas and some rather off-beat classes of user. Identifying what would create value and determining the minimum releasable feature-set brought out some interesting observations.

All participants were from government organisations. It is very encouraging to hear about people succeeding with Scrum implementations in organisations that are often seen as highly bureaucratic and very conservative. I wonder if such cases might provide CMM expert and researcher Dr Mark Paulk with evidence on where Agile is up to on Geoffrey Moore's technology adoption life cycle.

Well done guys on more than doubling Australia's CSPO certified population and all the best with your Product Ownership endeavours.

Ken Schwaber's Opening Address at the Spring 2009 Scrum Gathering

Rowan Bunning — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 06:52:00 GMT

Question: where can you find over 250 highly experienced project leaders including XP, Crystal and Agile luminaries, many dozens of PMPs and the lead researchers on CMM and RUP all in the same room within a resort with an enormous 4.5 acre atrium?

Answer: at the Spring 2009, Global Scrum Gathering within the luxurious Gaylord Palms resort in Orlando, Florida

A fine prelude to the conference was provided on Sunday the 15th with the Project Management Institute hosting a pre-conference party. This event was made only more memorable by NASA's contribution - the launching the Discovery Space Shuttle which the attendees watched from the venue's front entrance (see the non-zoomed photo on the right).

The conference proper opened with an address from Ken Schwaber (see the Welcome slide to the right). The following are some key points from his presentation. You can find the slides here on the Scrum Alliance site.

There is a focus on speakers from companies using Scrum rather than consultants
There are now 54,196 CSMs globally (more than indicated in the slide in the downloadable PDF)
The Fall gathering will be in Munich, Germany in in October 2009
The next Sprint gathering will be at the same venue in Orlando, Florida in 2010
The Scrum Alliance now has a physical home in Burlington, MA
A definition of Scrum has been distilled into a 16 page Scrum Guide
The Scrum Alliance is launching a new-look website known as the ScrumHub
If you do Scrum all alone, you will feel all alone - the new ScrumHub addresses this by connection people
There are now facilities for virtual user groups
If you are having difficulties with Scrum, you can now schedule someone to talk to you - this is not paid consulting
Doing Scrumbut is like putting duct tape over your mother-in-law's mouth!
A certain amount of sponsorship money from the gathering is to go to articles and research
The Scrum Alliance has enlisted researchers from:
- Mark Paulk from Carnegie Mellon University - best known for leading development of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM)
- Philipe Kruchten from the University of British Columbia - best known for his work on Rational Unified Process (RUP)

Q: How are we to budget in a scrum environment?

Rowan Bunning — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 06:58:00 GMT

This is the last in a series of three posts answering questions about Scrum that I have fielded recently.
If you have a comment, please add it below.

Many organisations are using Scrum to maximise value to the customer within the organisational reality of budgetary constraints. This requires that the project be scoped and estimated using the organisation's most effective approach. This may benefit from techniques that Scrum offers such as a high level product backlog, release planning and use of the team estimation techniques (such as Planning Poker) aimed at enhanced estimate accuracy. A common approach on larger projects is to provide a small provisional budget to build an initial Product Backlog, form an initial team and conduct estimation and release planning to finalise budgetary requirements for the full project.

The process followed for budgeting and working within a fixed budget may be similar to the process used for fixed price bidding. This involves establishing an initial Product Backlog that defines an agreed reasonable scope for the project that is estimated and quoted upon. This can be refined in iterations until both customer and the initial Scrum team and satisfied. Once the budget is set, the Product Owner can still be flexible within this constraint by simply swapping out requirements of equal or higher cost (estimated size) to what he/she wishes to add to the product backlog. The aim is to produce cohesive releases that represent the highest value to the organisation.

Budgetary calculations are typically significantly simpler with Scrum than traditional approaches as Scrum recommends multi-disciplinary teams whose composition is largely stable throughout the project. This contrasts with waterfall-style project in which the staffing of the team changes frequently with different specialists involved in different activity-based phases. For many Scrum projects, it is simply a case of budgeting for a team of known and consistent composition for a certain number of timeboxed iterations (sprints). The main variations then tend to be "boutique developers" who are brought in at certain times but this can generally be estimated as the gap between the required skills identified and the core team's composition.

In terms of estimating the budget accurately, Scrum projects benefit from a set of estimation techniques that are aimed directly at enhanced estimate accuracy and increasingly considered best practice. These are based around:

team estimation,
making assumptions explicit,
consideration of non-functionals,
consideration of uncertainty and risk,
accuracy over precision, as well as
relative complexity / size estimation techniques.

As well as this, the top priority requirements are continually re-estimated by the team on a rolling-basis during the project to improve their accuracy using the new information that has arisen and the learning that has occurred during the project.

Multidisciplinary team estimation harnesses the minds and perspectives of many including the people most likely to do the actual work in consultation with the customer. What is being estimated includes all activities necessary to deliver the item to clean and unambiguous definition of "Done" which usually includes satisfying non-functional requirements.

Accuracy over precision involves care to use appropriate units and avoid being overly precise at the expense of accuracy. Planning poker cards build this in by increasing the gap between possible estimates as size increases, thus indicating decreasing precision.

Relative complexity/size based estimation avoids assumptions that are inherent in time-based estimation including variables such as team size and velocity, system complexity at the time of implementation, unexpected impediments etc. Studies have shown that this is more accurate than time-based estimation and can be easily converted to time-based estimates after a couple of sprints. Prior to this, there are techniques for forecasting velocity that may be used. Relative units can be used as a unit of estimation within teams to improve accuracy and then converted into whichever units are most helpful for calculation of a budget against the planned backlog.

Q: How are standards and Enterprise Architecture considerations addressed in a Scrum environment?

Rowan Bunning — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:17:00 GMT

Scrum includes one or more project initiation Sprints up-front before build Sprints begin. These are usually referred to as "Sprint 0" (or "Sprint -1"). It is during Sprint 0 that the Scrum team carefully considers the established enterprise architecture and any relevant architectural standards to devise and agree upon an "initial architecture". This represents a solid starting-point from which the architecture can grow and emerge as needed requirements become clearer and more definite and the team learns more about the most appropriate technical solution within the constraints of necessary enterprise guidelines.

Early build sprints typically see a high proportion of time invested in building out the necessary architecture as needed to support the functional requirements. This "emergent architecture" approach aims to find a healthy balance between the two extremes of:

"over-engineering" - building architectural elements to support uncertain future needs that are either overkill or have a high likelihood of being obviated by change; and
no architectural investment - building the absolute minimum necessary to support the functional requirements being built in the current sprint no foresight to cater for what is likely to be needed in the future.

The latter approach is likely to lead to substantial rework. Both of these extremes can be wasteful and Scrum seeks to minimise waste. Therefore a balanced approach is needed that drives at a middle-road of minimised waste and maximised value.

Scrum and emergent design generally suggest a probability and value-based approach whereby we invest in building out architecture where the team is confident that it will be of benefit to support requirements that are more than likely. Further, that these benefits will outweigh the cost of investing in it. This is usually a decision that experienced developers and architects are well placed to make. These decisions are guided by the release plan and prioritised Product Backlog which typically give the team a good picture as what is coming up and the degree of certainty around future requirements can be discussed with the Product Owner. This all helps the team in designing the architecture and deciding on when to invest in various component of infrastructure.

Good Scrum teams work to identify known architectural constraints along with other non-functional requirements at the outset of a project and keep these updated throughout. These requirements are made highly visible (e.g. in the team room, on a wiki) and taken into consideration when reviewing functional requirements as they may constrain the design options and influence estimates.

Scrum recommends that requirements (both functional and non-functional) satisfy the INVEST criteria. This includes requirements that they are Estimatable and Testable. These critieria are particularly helpful in defining non-functional requirements which must be quantified clearly so that they can be objectively tested with a clear pass/fail result.