Webinar on Scrum Guide 2020 on March 21, 2023

Hi all,

We talked through the Scrum Guide.

Some questions came up:

Q: Will you tell us exactly how Scrum works?

Hmm.  The Scrum Guide kind of does that.  And I added to  that.  Still I am not sure it was “exactly” or “completely”.  There is always a lot more to add and you all hae more questions to ask.  (K.K. – please feel free to ask more.)

Again, it was a pretty good summary in an hour.  But not enough to make a major decision on.

Q: Book name.

It WAS “The Speed of Trust” by Stephen M.R. Covey, who I think is the son of Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits…).

Q: By change the plan — that’s not redoing the Sprint Backlog is it?

Hmm. I think they are saying you can change the Sprint Backlog (stories and tasks) as much as you want — so long as that *helps attain the Sprint Goal.

If the Sprint Goal changes, then you want to cancel and then re-start your Sprint.

Q: Is the PO the only person who can write user stories or can the team do them for tech stuff / and prioritizing based on tech dependencies?

Be careful.  Anyone can suggest a story.  Of any type (eg, user story or tech story).   The PO can reject it, or put it anywhere in the Prod Bklog.  Again, anyone (including the team) can talk about things (costs, effort, dependencies, etc) that might affect the ordering in the Prod Bklog.  But the PO must decide any such change.

Yes, I agree, if the PO is “brain-dead” on technical dependencies, it could cause a mess.  But we NEED one final decision-maker.

Q: Is building the environments (eg, Dev, QA, Prod) — can that work be considered as a story or Epic?

Yes, maybe an epic initially, and then a bunch of stories to make the work bite-sized.

These stories go into OUR product backlog if we (our team) is going to do that work.  To the degree other people are going to do that work, it might go into another Prod Bklog is be tracked elsewhere.

Q: What does OOPSLA stand for?

Object-oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications – It was a conference and is not part of the SPLASH conference.

An argument is made that OOP (Object Oriented Programming) was key in getting Agile off the ground.  Probably at least somewhat true.

Q: What does it mean for a Sprint Goal to become invalid?

One example: Too much has changed.  Ex: Covid, Russian invasion of Ukraine, banking crisis, whatever.  Change or risk.  And you now “feel” that continuing with the current Sprint Goal makes no sense.  So, cancel that sprint.  And probably start a new Sprint (real soon).

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I may add more.

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