Scrum World: I am a developer

First thing in the morning, I check the scrum board to see which task is in progress and assigned to me
I don’t have anything in progress, so it is time to pick up something new
I follow the priorities and I pick up something from the top of the list
I work on the task, comply with best practices, write unit and integration tests
When I am done I create a review for a peer and move the tasks to the ‘Review’ column
I take some time to review the tasks that are assigned to me, so my colleagues can also progress
My task comes back from review and I need to make some minor changes
After making the changes I update the files in the review and quickly get an OK from a peer
I move the task to the ‘Testing’ column
At the end of the day I deploy a release on the development environment, which includes all the tasks which are now in the ‘Testing’ column, including the one I implemented today

The next day…

As usual my work isn’t quite finish because a bug was raised by the test team on the task I implemented yesterday
I fix the issue and make sure the unit and integration tests are up to date
I create a review which is approved after a few hours
I deploy the fix on the development environment
I check later and notice the issue has been moved to the ‘Done’ column by the test team
I realize how good it is to use Scrum and work together with everyone in the team to achieve our common goals!

Tracking progress the easy way

This sprint we started using Jira to track our progress. The Greenhopper Plugin produces a really nice burn-down chart, therefore we don’t have to do all that work manually. The good thing is that we can log the work done and update the remaining estimates quite quickly at the end of the day and have an up-to-date chart that tell us how good we’re doing or if we are running out of time.

Above is the burn-down chart for the first sprint of a new project we are working on. You can see we finished 1 day earlier and we overestimated some of the tasks but in the end it turn out to be a very good sprint with software ready to demo. 🙂

Click the here for a more detailed version of the chart.

Certified Scrum Master