Sunday 25 October 2009

What have we learnt today?

I've started today another round of the Practical Scrum Course. At the end of the first day I search for some feedback in the form of two questions I ask:

1) What was the most surprising thing you have heard today?

2) What is the most controversial thing you have heard today?

here are the answers I've got (not edited):

The Most Surprising

  1. No true need for comprehensive documentation.
  2. Estimations are done in units which does not represent time.
  3. "Done" should be defined, sounds trivial but when one think of it ...
  4. Agile can works for large groups.
  5. Waterfall was presented as an example for a flawed process.
  6. Scrum can be an appropriate process for most projects (90%)
  7. Agile and Scrum, are established and well defined methodologies.
  8. No Clear definition of who is the PO

The most controversial

  1. Scrum can work for "Real Time" projects.
  2. One of the goal of an Agile Process is to have Fun.
  3. Velocity can't be compared between different teams.
  4. Short iterations results in intensive management, in which we repeat many steps which lead to big overheads. (this is in response to the idea that short iterations are the bets way to develop software)
  5. Stories should/can be represented by one sentence in the "customer language".
  6. a process can work without "Requirements Documents"
  7. Documentation is not needed.

Clearly there are some things I need to go over and refine again. However I also think that we are making progress.

2 comments:

Markus Gärtner said...

"Documentation is not needed" might be understood wrong. This is interesting. Just because Agile is asking for just the right documentation, it does not necessarily mean no documentation at all, it just means it might not be needed for your particular context. I think it's a very common misconception about Agile.

Lior Friedman: said...

I think it was understood wrong (which I'll need to make clear). what i was trying to convey is more in the spirit of "Some places found that they manage to have a good process without many of the regular documentations used in a classical process, therefore try to think if you actually need all those documentations" or something in that spirit.
and yes Agile==No Documentation is a common misconception i try to make absolutely clear (i even have that on a slide tat the beginning)

 
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