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The only thing I appreciate about my experience with Scrum was that I could use the hours long "sprint planning" meetings to reflect on my long term goal of nev

by minimax 14y ago

The only thing I appreciate about my experience with Scrum was that I could use the hours long "sprint planning" meetings to reflect on my long term goal of never having to sit through another hours long "sprint planning" meeting ever again.

vailripper 14y ago
My experience has been that, while planning meetings are quite painful, they're the most valuable part of Agile. Forcing yourself to sit down every week and decide what really matters is extremely valuable and keeps teams focused.
- vbl 14y ago
  Short of actually making (good, working) stuff, informed and merciless prioritization is the most important thing you can do in producing software.
  - thirdtruck 14y ago
    And for life in general.
- darkxanthos 14y ago
  Where in the Agile manifesto does it say "Thou shalt have planning meetings."?
adrianhoward 14y ago
And just by the fact that the sprint planning meeting is taking hours I can tell that they're not doing Scrum effectively ;-)
- ryanbrunner 14y ago
  In what way? I think multiple hours long sprint planning meetings can be necessary in some cases, if the alternative is even more meetings spread out throughout the sprint. It's definitely an art form finding the right balance of how much to plan at the start and how much to leave to a conversation, but overcorrecting away from planning meetings can very easily cause frustrations and disagreements about what a story "really meant".
  - adrianhoward 14y ago
    I dunno. Every single time I've encountered sprint planning meetings that regularly run over a couple of hours I've been able to reduce the time and keep everybody happy. Maybe there are cases that aren't like that but I've not come across them. The kinds of issues that I've seen are things like: * Teams not knowing about some methods that you can use to estimate large numbers of stories quickly - instead of spending N hours doing rounds of planning poker for each one. * Teams trying to breakdown too much of the backlog at a time rather than relying on keeping distant * The PO not coming to the meeting with a list of prioritised stories so folk are trying to prioritise and estimate everything at the same time (I'm not saying that prioritisation can't change during the planning meeting - but the PO needs to come prepared IMHO) * Stories coming in at the wrong level of granularity so that everybody has to spend time breaking stuff down to implementable chunks. * Teams lacking any kind of definition-of-ready for stories that are at the stage where they can be implemented. * Teams lacking common agreed definitions of done for stories ... and so on... (this is for one or two week sprints mind - if folk are running old-school one month sprints then I guess longer sprint planning meetings are unavoidable.)
    - ryanbrunner 14y ago
      I'm honestly curious about methods for estimating large numbers of stories, because that definitely sounds like a problem we deal with.
      - adrianhoward 14y ago
        Silent Grouping is one technique http://systemagility.com/2011/05/22/using-silent-grouping-to-size-user-stories/ http://systemagility.com/2011/05/22/using-silent-grouping-to... Googling around that will find you some variant methods that I'm too lazy to dig out ;-) Ping me if you need more.

by minimax 14y ago

vailripper 14y ago

My experience has been that, while planning meetings are quite painful, they're the most valuable part of Agile. Forcing yourself to sit down every week and decide what really matters is extremely valuable and keeps teams focused.

vbl 14y ago
Short of actually making (good, working) stuff, informed and merciless prioritization is the most important thing you can do in producing software.
- thirdtruck 14y ago
  And for life in general.
darkxanthos 14y ago
Where in the Agile manifesto does it say "Thou shalt have planning meetings."?

adrianhoward 14y ago

And just by the fact that the sprint planning meeting is taking hours I can tell that they're not doing Scrum effectively ;-)

ryanbrunner 14y ago
In what way? I think multiple hours long sprint planning meetings can be necessary in some cases, if the alternative is even more meetings spread out throughout the sprint. It's definitely an art form finding the right balance of how much to plan at the start and how much to leave to a conversation, but overcorrecting away from planning meetings can very easily cause frustrations and disagreements about what a story "really meant".
- adrianhoward 14y ago
  I dunno. Every single time I've encountered sprint planning meetings that regularly run over a couple of hours I've been able to reduce the time and keep everybody happy. Maybe there are cases that aren't like that but I've not come across them. The kinds of issues that I've seen are things like: * Teams not knowing about some methods that you can use to estimate large numbers of stories quickly - instead of spending N hours doing rounds of planning poker for each one. * Teams trying to breakdown too much of the backlog at a time rather than relying on keeping distant * The PO not coming to the meeting with a list of prioritised stories so folk are trying to prioritise and estimate everything at the same time (I'm not saying that prioritisation can't change during the planning meeting - but the PO needs to come prepared IMHO) * Stories coming in at the wrong level of granularity so that everybody has to spend time breaking stuff down to implementable chunks. * Teams lacking any kind of definition-of-ready for stories that are at the stage where they can be implemented. * Teams lacking common agreed definitions of done for stories ... and so on... (this is for one or two week sprints mind - if folk are running old-school one month sprints then I guess longer sprint planning meetings are unavoidable.)
  - ryanbrunner 14y ago
    I'm honestly curious about methods for estimating large numbers of stories, because that definitely sounds like a problem we deal with.
    - adrianhoward 14y ago
      Silent Grouping is one technique http://systemagility.com/2011/05/22/using-silent-grouping-to-size-user-stories/ http://systemagility.com/2011/05/22/using-silent-grouping-to... Googling around that will find you some variant methods that I'm too lazy to dig out ;-) Ping me if you need more.