What have we learnt today

Last week we finished another cycle of the Practical Scrum course, and like always usual at the end of each day I’m asking a few questions to gather some feedback.

Here are the answers I got after at the end of day 2 and 3 (the answers for the first day are here):

What would be easiest to adopt in your own work environment?

• Decomposing tasks into very small chunk.
• Estimation techniques
• Product Backlog
• short iteration, and sprint planning
• the sprint model
• dividing project work into stories
• priority poker

What would be impossible to apply in your work environment?

• having an engineer dedicate 100% to a single project.
• Scrum Master Job
• agreement and commitment with clients. (still didn’t understand how to do it, probably dependant on the organization)
• Fixed Sprint Time
• focusing people on a small number of projects.
• defining sprints, need the entire organization to change.
• team responsibility
• Daily meetings

What if adopted, would bring the most value to you?

• Daily meetings, sprints
• Agile methodology (not necessarily scrum) and working in vertical and not horizontal slices.
• engineering practices like TDD, CI,…
• having a PO
• short cycles
• Fixed sprint length
• Test automation

What, would be useless in your work place?

• The ongoing arguments
• Let the team decide
• daily meetings
• Long list of stories
• Having a Scrum Master

The last note I got was more of a story here it is translated:

in large this i like the methodology and it should be adopted. we have problems of meeting deadlines and of understanding requirements s i think Scrum can help us. i also don’t see anything specific which is useless. But i think that part of our organization culture will require change. Therefore i will be happy if knowledge of Scrum will be given to our management.

The funny thing to me that all of these people came from the same company and judging from some of the conflicting response I’m guessing that there are many cultures inside that organization. I wonder if that can be generalized to all companies?