Gerd’s Blog

In one of Alister Cockburns last posts he was writing about Using RUP to fix Scrum. As i read his small article one sentence attracted my attention. He wrote: The pendulum has swung too far from “too much planning” to “not enough understanding”. I have the same feeling for some time now. The picture on the left shows a typical iterative scrum process where the backlogs on the left side are used to add features to a new iteration. What’s interesting is that more and more people and companies try to hold the Product Backlog as small as possible and push new features directly into sprints. So what is bad with this approach you would ask?

The backlog was intended as a place where ideas can grow. I never have seen Stories/Features that can be developed as they are written in the Backlog. In my Opinion this happens because most of the people involved don’t have or take the the time to think about the feature that should be implemented. A short cycle to develop new features should be aimed but not for every price. There are some other aspects that need to be considered and one of is that people must understand the product they are developing.

The second issue I have seen with short Product Backlogs is that Release Planing suffers. If you do not have enough Stories in your backlog to plan for the next release you will ship everything breaks down. In this moment everybody in the Team looses the goal for the Product. I would compare it with a scene from Forrest Gump where he starts to run without any goal. This is not working in reality.

There are three lessons I have learned in the last three years in reference to the issues I mentioned above:

1. Never start any sprint without a goal
2. Never start a product development without an Release Plan
3. Try to discuss Stories/Features as soon as possible with a bigger group of people

Several weeks ago i posted about “Making JIRA a little more agile“. Today I found a Company called Green Pepper Software that has developed a product called Green Hopper which extends JIRA with stuff that is more common in the agile world than the list views the product provides out of the box.

They added an very intuitive Dash board for planing releases and a possibility to generate Burn down charts. In comparison with Mingle I have to say that i would prefer Green Hopper. Mingle is just an agile project management tool, JIRA was original invented as Bug Tracking Tool but can be extended with Green Hopper to an project management tool. The second advantage of JIRA is that there are thousands of other Plugins available and you have the possibility to write some of them on your own.