Jacob SC2

• Chapter 4: What is the purpose of the sprint?  What are the rules that govern a sprint?

A sprint is a period of time in which a team set's aside a number of tasks to be completed.  At the end of the sprint the team evaluates what happened adjusts and repeats.  A sprint is meant to get a lot of work done in a short period of time and is governed by the tasks/stories that have been laid out for it and the amount of time it takes.

• Chapter 5: Why is multitasking wasteful?  When in your own life do you refuse to multitask and just focus on a single task?

Multitasking is wasteful because you lose time switching back and forth between tasks.  Actually multitasking is really just juggling between two things and the brain just isn't equipped to do this.  I refuse to multitask whenever I do homework since if I get distracted I tend to stay distracted for a long time.

• Chapter 5: We're used to the idea of a hero working extra hard to save the day.  Why does Sutherland hate on the hero?

I'm not sure that Sutherland hates people who act as a hero, but rather the fact that they have to.  If a hero is needed to finish the project on time then obviously the team isn't doing it's job right.  There is also the fact that a hero is a single person and Scrum is all about improving on the team.

• Chapter 6: Explain how planning poker is supposed to work.  Mention the halo effect, Fibonacci numbers, who should play it, and the discussion that should occur when estimates vary too much.

Planning poker is when people use cards with numbers from the Fibonacci sequence on them  to try to rate the difficulty of a task.  It is designed to be quick and to avoid the halo effect of someone seeming like they know what they are talking about and everyone thinking themselves wrong.  Each person lays down a card with one of the numbers and as long as they are all within one of each other they are averaged.  If they are not, the high and the low each explain why they think theirs is correct and the cards are played again and averaged.

• Chapter 6: What does the "Definition of Done" mean?  Why is it critical that the entire team understands the DoD for each task?

The definition of done refers to what needs to be accomplished for a task or story to be considered complete and moved out of in progress.  This is critical, because if definitions of done vary, one team member can think a task is done, mark it as such, and move on to the next one.  This is a problem because a task that isn't done to the set specs may not work when it is needed.

• Summary

This section of the book covered quite a few aspects of scrum including planning poker, sprints, DOD, and others.  It also covered how to enact these and why they are used.