Solvis is a full-service management consulting company specializing in Customer Relationship Management. Our team's experience and technical know-how will help your company to develop and deploy effective, efficient, technologically savvy demand generation and customer loyalty solutions.
SAN FRANCISCO – Salesforce.com Dreamforce Conference – November 19, 2009 – CA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CA), the leader in Enterprise IT Management, and salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced they have partnered to deliver agile development management in the cloud on the Force.com platform.
We here at Solvis have mentioned before that when implementing Social Media or CRM SaaS solutions, we support the use of the Agile Methodology and particularly the Scrum Framework. So how can one learn this in 10 minutes or less? Read on:
Lance Dacy, a certified Scrum Master and Product Owner based in Dallas, TX, (DFW Scrum Alliance) has been a great mentor for us in implementing Scrum. He recently shared the following with us regarding a summary of The Framework:
"Scrum uses the real-world progress of a project — not a best guess or uninformed forecast — to plan and schedule releases. In Scrum, projects are divided into succinct work cadences, known as sprints, which are typically one week, two weeks, or three weeks in duration. At the end of each sprint, stakeholders and team members meet to assess the progress of a project and plan its next steps. This allows a project’s direction to be adjusted or reoriented based on completed work, not speculation or predictions.
Philosophically, this emphasis on an ongoing assessment of completed work is largely responsible for its popularity with managers and developers alike. But what allows the Scrum methodology to really work is a set of roles, responsibilities, and meetings that never change. If Scrum’s capacity for adaption and flexibility makes it an appealing option, the stability of its practices give teams something to lean on when development gets chaotic."
Also, there has been a video that has gone "viral" in the Scrum-world recently, that does a great job demonstrating the Scrum concepts in 8 minutes (be sure to click on the "HD" button on the bottom right side of the screen for better visibility), please click below for the video:
The general idea is to deliver a functional piece of software every sprint (2 - 4 week time frame). Remember, this does not imply "production ready". This is an iterative approach to developing a product toward production-ready status, with a focus on constant improvement.
Our Scrum process flows as follows:
1.User Stories are created, based on requirements. These are created in “ScrumWorks”, a software package that offers a free version (Basic) at http://danube.com/. 2. Tasks are added to each user story and we assign an estimation to the task in hours 3. A point person is assigned to each task 4. User Stories are then placed into "Sprints" which are short development cycles. 5. At the end of each day, the Project Manager or the “Scrum Master” collect these hours and update the task in ScrumWorks. 6. We conduct a daily "Scrum meeting" where we hold a development review: what was completed, what is planned, and roadblocks.
One of the important results of the daily scrum is an understanding of the daily burn-down calculation, which shows us:
a. Total hours for the sprint b. Total days for the sprint c. Ideal number of hours to be ‘burned’ daily d. The number of hours we burned the previous day e. The delta between how many hours we should have burned to stay on track vs. what we actually burned f. The number of hours left in the Sprint g. The number of hours we NEED to burn today in order to stay on-track and to not fall behind.
Using Scrum, we know on a daily basis the following:
1. Who completed which tasks and which tasks are planned 2. How much time a resource spent working on the sprint 3. How the team is tracking toward on-time delivery of the sprint
Although I have personally been an Agile practitioner for some time, I am now very much a Scrum framework advocate! This is the an excellent example of the marriage of a management process to a software package(Scrumworks).
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