I am a sucker for a "59 Minute Scrum" hosted by Bob Galen. I had participated in one last November as documented in this Blog. Last night the IIBA hosted Bob and I was again a member of a six person team producing a brochure for the Pampered Pooch Day Care. I wanted to get another feel for the team dynamics during the sprints and to compare the results with the last session.
Here are my observations:
1. While the aRTP session was comprised mainly of programmers and the IIBA was comprised of business analysts (duh), there was little difference in the results of producing a brochure. I guess if Bob ran a session at the Pet Care Services Association the outcome might be different.
2. Before we started the Day 2 Sprint, Bob pulled the four Scrum Masters aside and told two of them to go back and emphasize the quality and completeness of the brochure, and told the remain two Scrum Masters to tell there teams to push for as much content as possible in the time remaining. The results were telling. The two teams pushing for Quantity delivered 13 and 8 user stories respectively, and the two focused on Quality delivered 6 and 4 user stories. So teams will listen to the direction of the Scrum Master. Ultimately to have a released product both the Quantity and Quality need to be good enough. So is it better to get lots of 60% quality content in early sprints and then tighten it up all at once towards the end of the iteration? OR do you push for 80% quality content and achieve less content per sprint. A real trade off that the team needs to decide based on coupling/cohesion of the user stories. If the stories have few dependencies then push for the higher quality per sprint. With lots of dependencies you need the total content present to debug and refactor.
