Scrum: How to understand stand up and burn down is effective ?
Scrum
burn down chart and daily stand up meeting are the most important part
of the scrum process to keep the team on focus. Scrum is good on bring
transparency in development process. With utilizing better engineering
practice like test driven development, continuous integration we could
keep our productivity and fun on the same line.
If you are one of those people who are wondering
What is called “stand up”?
I have a brief for you.
scrum stand up meeting
On the picture you could see, there are few people who are standing up and discussing about the following 3 topics -
- What i have done yesterday!
- What i will do today!
- Where i have been stucking!
This is a required daily meeting where 10 minutes are spent together
with all team members, this meeting is used to adjust the tasks among
the team members also to monitor the current status.
Later this meeting is followed by a burn down chart which is attach
on the wall or send through email to everyone or upload on some place
which is visible to everyone.
scrum burn down chart
What is burn down chart ?
Burn down chart is a graph which is used to visualize how much hours
work is left in an iteration (sprint). on the illustration you’d see a
white line which is visualizing average burning hours per day. If we
have planned for 180 hours tasks for whole iteration. Average burning
hours should be minimum 180 / 8 days (if you have 8 days span sprint) =
22.5 hours to keep us on target.
The green line is visualizing the real team progress, you see this is
not always up to the base line. It is moving up and down thus we are
determining how the team is performing. If this green line is too
upwards from the base line it means we are behind the schedule if that
goes far below from the base line that reflects bad planning.
How to understand your team is understanding them?
I found the following symptoms to understand that our team members are understanding the importance -
- Everyone attending daily stand up on time.
- Everyone feeling responsible and notifying before they get late in office.
- Everyone eagerly reporting their status and taking commitment for today
- Team members are feeling guilty if some of them didn’t complete the commitment
- Everyone eagerly waiting to see the change in burn down chart
- If burn down shows some upward progress everyone get concerns and work hard
- Everyone feeling proud of the progress which shows in burn down.
- Everyone working every day not waiting for last moments push.
- Everyone keeping their daily commitments
- When burn down curve is not moving too upward or not falling too downwards.
Most important change in scrum is your team doesn’t need to work over
night or over weekend to keep progress around the base line. (i will
later discuss about how iterative and incremental planning can help).
Fortunately we have discovered these changes on our current team.
The most important thing is feeling the “team way” which we are
missing in most of our teams, I guess utilizing the tools and process
like scrum that can be improved a lot.
best wishes,