Scrum

In 2018, we published 44 posts on our blog, including technical how-to’s, a series on UX research methods, web development best practices, and tips for project management. Among all those posts, 18 rose to the top of the popularity list in 2018.

The problem

The Scrum and Kanban frameworks are tools for development teams, and as with any job, it’s crucial to pick the right tool for the situation at hand. Caktus teams have been using Scrum for over two years, but one of my teams started to bring up in retrospectives that sprint deadlines felt arbitrary and were irrelevant to anyone outside the team. They also had to do some mental gymnastics to plan sprints that were so brittle they were likely to fall apart due to restricted monthly project budgets. As a result, I started to ask myself some difficult questions.

The words we use, and the tone in which we use them, can either nurture or hinder the growth of Scrum teams. This is especially true for teams that are new to Scrum or that may be transitioning into a new Agile methodology.

March 2018 marked the end of my fourth year as a Scrum master. I began with a Certified ScrumMaster workshop in 2014 and haven’t stopped learning since. I keep a running list titled “Lessons Learned,” where I jot down thoughts I find significant as they occur to me so that I can go back to the list and draw from my little bank of personal wisdom.

Another quarter, another ShipIt Day! Take a look at what our team dove into in the first part of 2018.

Looking for some pointers to improve my own client management skills, I scoured the internet to find practical ideas on how to handle challenges better as the product owner (PO) in a client-services organization. I came up completely short.

At Caktus, each team works on multiple client-service projects at once, and it’s sometimes challenging to adapt different clients’ various tools and workflows into a single Scrum team’s process.

Early in your transition to Scrum, you will be faced with a hard truth: your team or organization has job titles and Scrum has roles, and there is probably little to no overlap between the two. How do you map Susan, lead technical architect, and Tom, project manager, to the three Scrum roles: product owner, Scrum master, and developer?

In Scrum, the backlog of tasks is ordered by the Product Owner from highest to lowest business value - not merely prioritized - so that the team knows what the most valuable items are. This helps to prevent Product Owners/Project Managers from being able to say two or more Product Backlog Items (PBIs) are the “same priority.” And this makes sense for the most part. However there are times when this information is not enough.

Caktus began the process of adopting Scrum mid-November 2015 with two days of onsite Scrum training and fully transitioned to a Scrum environment in January 2016. From our original epiphany of “Yes! We want Scrum!” to the beginning of our first sprint, it took us six weeks to design and execute a process and transition plan. This is how we did it: