Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber

Author:Ken Schwaber [Schwaber, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: ISBN:073561993x
Publisher: Microsoft Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

How Hard It Is to Change

It was time to plan what the Team would do over the course of the first Sprint and subsequent Sprints. We estimated how much time on average the team members had available every month. We added this up to get a rough feel for how much time the Team could devote to each Sprint. Then, starting at the top of the Product Backlog, we identified how many items could be potentially included in the first Sprint. We continued down the Product Backlog, estimating potential Sprint contents until the entire Product Backlog was parsed into seven Sprints.

We all sat back. Ed had promised that the Team would deliver the system in five months. Our rough calculations indicated the system would be ready in seven months. Nobody said it, but we all knew that the new definition of “done” contributed to the additional two months. If we had stuck with the Team’s first estimates, we might have ended up with an estimate of five months. And if the Team hadn’t worked according to this new definition of “done,” it might well have delivered the system in five months. But because Julie now understood what “done” meant, the extra time was required. I looked at Julie and asked her whether she wanted us to go back to the old estimates. Julie was upset. She wanted to know how we had committed to five months if we knew that we would be delivering a substandard system. I told Julie that we hadn’t known, that until this planning session we couldn’t actually predict one way or another.

However, Ed had agreed with his management that the project would be done in five months. Now he would have to tell his management that he had been wrong. I told Ed that this shouldn’t be a problem. After all, it was Julie who was paying for the system, and she understood why the estimate had increased from five to seven months. Also, for all we knew, the Team might finish in less than five months—or more than five months. At this point, we couldn’t be certain. We would know a little better by the end of the first Sprint; at that point, we would have an idea of how quickly the Team could turn Product Backlog into functionality, and we could adjust the estimated number of Sprints. Alternatively, if we wanted to increase the speed at which the Team was working, we could bring some people who knew the old cash system on board. These were all possibilities that Julie, the Team, and Ed could consider at the end of each Sprint.

Ed was profoundly uncomfortable with this approach. In the past, he’d always stuck to his initial estimates, and the Team had never let him down. Yes, he agreed, he now had better information about the project than he had before. However, the culture at MegaBank was such that once you said five months, that was all anyone remembered. Ed then turned to

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