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I find this technique works well where you have a medium to large sized product back-log... As a very rough rule of thumb anything under 25 items is probably manageable with Planning poker.... beyond this number is where Affinity Estimation can be a really useful tool in the Scrum Master's arsenal!
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Mention having a hardening sprint in certain agile evangelist circles and your ears will probably be in for a hard time!
If your enforcing your definition of done, If each sprint is truly delivering a completed, fully tested, 'potentially' shippable product, If your employing good XP practices with have high unit and integration test coverage and you have a continuous delivery pipeline why do you need a hardening sprint?
What about breaking down large complex non-user stories? I often warn of the danger of creating too many non-user stories or too many technical stories as they can tend to lead to horizontal development thinking as opposed to vertical slice delivery and make enforcing a definition of done less transparent…. However some systems simply don’t have user stories – Or at least not many!
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I love Agile! I really do, it's brilliant!!! It really is and one of the things I love most are the words we use..... Scrum, Grooming the Backlog and ceremonies, I love a good ceremony... and as Scrum Master I like to think I'm the grand master of ceremonies... I might even buy the big red robe one day!! But one of the things I love more than any other... is the 'The Information Radiator'.
What a brilliant name! I wish I'd coined the phase.... but what is the Information Radiator?
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How many projects have you worked on where the overall goal seems unclear, vague or just lost in the myths of time and space?
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I've used the technique of Story Mapping countless times at project inception to assist in understanding the problem domain area, ensuing a shared understanding of the problem and a collaborative approach to building a product backlog. Unfortunately I can't really claim any credit for this methodology!!
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What team isn't trying to be more collaborative these days? However one of the problems you can face as a Scrum Master is how do you encourage the team to work closer together or work with other teams more?
One of the great things about agile is the terminology we use... Theres nothing better than grooming the backlog, updating the information radiator and attending all of our ceremonies!
But being honest - those of us in the agile arena do ourselves no favours talking about velocity and Kanban boards without first explaining some of these terms!
Ideally the goal of the iteration should be set by the product owner ( PO), It’s their opportunity to set the agenda and to ensure that everyone understands what the focus of the sprint is. It’s also the responsibility of the scrum team to commit to the goal or if the goal is unobtainable within a single iteration to explain this to the PO. In determining if a goal is achievable the final say is with the scrum team and the PO should be respectful of their opinion (That doesn’t mean that the PO shouldn’t challenge the team however)
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if you're doing Scrum there is in my opinion 10 must do's!
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