looking east

At Exoweb, daily stand-ups are integrated part of the daily routine. Every team will get together at some point of the day and spend 5-15 minutes discussing their current progress. Stand-ups or daily scrums are short team meetings during which every member of the team answers the following three questions:

• What did I accomplish yesterday?
• What will I do today?
• What obstacles are impeding my progress?

From an observer’s point of view, stand-ups are status meetings during which developers report their work. However, from a broader scrum perspective, they are much more than that. Daily scrums are about team self-organisation, commitment, and focus, as Martin Fowler explains in his excellent article It’s not just standing up. During the stand-ups, the members of the team update each other instead of a manager. To keep the energy level high and to act as a daily motivator, it is important to keep the daily scrums short. Standing up is a great way to accomplish this.

At our team, we have a pinboard with all the tasks of the current sprint. The task cards are labelled with the Trac ticket number and a short description. The cards also contain a table which is updated every day with the time spent on the ticket and the remaining story points. Whenever a team member picks a ticket, the person’s picture is placed next to the task. Tickets are organised in five different columns on the board: New, Ongoing, Commited, Tweaking, and Done. Additionally, the pinboard contains the updated burndown chart of the project.

Before the daily stand-up, every programmer has to update his ticket, report the code quality and the number of code reviews he has done on the previous day. The team will then gather around the pinboard for the daily scrum.

The role of the pinboard is crucial: It’s a way for every team member to observe the current sprint’s status. At a glance you can see who is currently working on which task, how many story points have been completed in the current sprint, and how many points remain to be done. The pinboard also doubles as a meeting place for daily stand-ups and team members discussing tasks. Despite using a web-based task management system, having a real pinboard definitely improves the scrum experience, facilitates project overview, and acts as the central point of orientation for a project.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 5:55 am and is filed under exoweb, scrum.