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Week 5: Scrum: Part 2

Chapters 4-6 look at how we work.  It starts with sprints, a time-boxed chunk of work, and how they should run.  It moves on to human productivity and finishes with planning a sprint through stories.

Copy and paste the most interesting five questions below into a new blog post (at least one per chapter).  As you read the second three chapters, write your response to each question below the question.  At the bottom of the post, summarize what you learned.  Tag the post with "SC2".  During the commenting days, write a comment on two other people's posts.

• Chapter 4: What is the purpose of the sprint?  What are the rules that govern a sprint?
• Chapter 4: Sutherland required his first scrum team to throw out all titles.  Why?  Where (inside and outside FRC) have you seen titles get in the way of getting things done?  Where can titles be a positive thing on a team?
• Chapter 4: The daily scrum should be "closer to a football huddle [than individuals reporting out]".  Explain why.  
• Chapter 5: Why is multitasking wasteful?  When in your own life do you refuse to multitask and just focus on a single task?
• Chapter 5: One section is titled "half done isn't done at all".  What are some half-done tasks we have with our FRC team?
• Chapter 5: According to the Maxwell curve, an employee reaches peak work completion in a scrum environment at how many hours / week?  Given that we all work on robotics AFTER a full week of work or school, how many hours do you think we should be working each week during the build season to maximize how much we can get done?  How does this compare to how often we met last season?
• 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?
• Chapter 6: What does the "Definition of Done" mean?  Why is it critical that the entire team understands the DoD for each task?
• Chapter 6: An phrase popularized by Eisenhower says "the plan is worthless, but planning is everything".  Explain this in the context of the chapter.
• 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.
• Chapter 6: What are the differences between tasks and stories?  Describe the key attributes of a good story and why they are needed.
• Chapter 6: What is the appropriate size of a story?  Write two or more example stories that could pertain to our FRC team.
• Chapter 6: Explain how the INVEST criteria make a story more useful for the team.  Give an FRC-specific example story and explain how it meets each criterion (you can use an example from the last question).
• End with a summary of what you learned.