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Scrum and XP from the Trenches - 90 page experience report

Posted by Kurt Christensen on Dec 05, 2006

Sections: Process & Practices
Topics: Agile in the Enterprise ,; Agile ,; Agile Techniques
Tags: Coaching and Mentoring ,; Introducing Agile ,; Scrum ,; Best Practices ,; XP

In his recently published "Scrum and XP From the Trenches [pdf]," Henrik Kniberg of Crisp gives a comprehensive description of how he implemented a mix of Scrum and XP practices for a development team of 40 people. Similar to other books and experience reports, Henrik discusses such topics as:

Running a sprint planning meeting
Managing the product and sprint backlogs
Coaching the daily scrum
Integrating testers with the development team

In addition to this, however, Henrik goes on to describe some of the more difficult - and rarely covered - aspects of working in an agile organization, including coordinating the efforts of multiple Scrum teams. Throughout, Henrik includes advice and observations:

The sprint goal may seem rather silly and contrived during the sprint planning, but it often comes to use in mid-sprint, when people are starting to get confused about what they should be doing. If you have several Scrum teams (like we do) working on different products it is very useful to be able to list the sprint goals of all teams on a single wiki page (or whatever) and put them up in a prominent space so that everybody in the company (not only top-level management) knows what the company is doing - and why!

The paper often discusses multiple approaches that were tried for a problem, pointing out what worked and what didn't. Henrik also isn't afraid to point out areas in which his team could have done better:

I've probably given you the impression that we have testers in all Scrum teams, that we have a huge acceptance test team for each product, that we release after each sprint, etc., etc. Well, we don't. We've sometimes managed to do this stuff, and we've seen that it works when we do. But we are still far from an acceptable quality assurance process, and we still have a lot to learn there.