Scrum from the Trenches

Vaibhav, a friend and colleague at work, decided to start blogging about Scrum. I suggested the title Scrum from the Trenches, and he went with it:
http://scrumfromthetrenches.blogspot.com/.

He and I advocated the use of Scrum a year ago as my team was tasked with an aggressive project in which we had the opportunity to work closely with the product manager. We implemented the main pieces of Scrum like daily meetings, planning sessions, and sprint-end demos, but also left out a few things like story estimation and the plotting of burn-down charts. We knew we had a ways to go if we were going to claim we were doing Scrum, but it was a good start and the project management group began to buy into it as a viable practice for future development.

This year, the team was tasked with a similar project. To prepare for it, 2 project managers, the QA manager, and Vaibhav attended Scrum training up in the Silicon Valley. Through lecture and hands-on exercises, they learned the ins and outs of textbook Scrum and returned to work eager to try it out. The team is now sub-dividing stories into tasks and even playing Planning Poker. How is is going? That's the subject of Vaibhav's new blog. Read it and find out.