Not Enough Slack in My Diet

I've been in a bit of a crunch at work and at home and now it's time to get back to sharing my experiances from the trenches. I have a few more Scrum sprints under my belt since I first started this blog.

What Scrum does rather nicely is focus the team on what they committed to do for the month. The thing to watch out for is making sure that those commitments are worth tracking in the first place. The folks at Agile Advice put out a great blog on the "Five Signs of Trouble in an Iteration". Twice we experianced the burndown associated with the "Special Quiz Section" where there was a big drop off in time remaining. This was due to the realization that we really didn't need to track special projects that weren't part of the overall goals of the team for the month. Or, there was a rather nebulous deliverable that turned out to be much easier that anticipated. It's best to leave the Product Backlog to the things that matter and plan the monthly Sprint around that backlog. When it comes to the fluff - just leave it chaulked up to overhead and don't track it directly in the sprint.