Scrum生命周期

Recently while cleaning up my photo albums I found some interesting old pictures which were captured while I was leading a Scrum project. These white board pictures illustrate how we incrementally deliver from scratch. Looking at these pictures I really enjoy recollecting the days when I was working together with my team; days we spent suffering, learning and growing together.

Sprint # 0.

At that time the team was just busy like crazy. We got all infrastructure stuff ready in this period of time (we call it Sprint 0). The team also made some smart decisions; one of those was that we use a white board as our User Story completion tracking system, and use different color sticky notes for different types of User Stories.

Sprint # 1.

This picture was taken in the middle of our first Sprint. We got our Product Backlog prioritized and started from some foundational technical tasks. Fortunately, my team was strong enough so that we also delivered some of the highest priority (which also happened to be some of the simplest) User Stories.

Sprint # 2.

This picture was taken on the last day of our second Sprint. Things were just going smoothly. We delivered all the planned User Stories and had a very successfully Sprint Review meeting to our client. The client was happy and we did the Sprint planning for the next Sprint right after the Sprint Review meeting. The team was excited and confident that we can deliver more story points in the next Sprint.

Sprint # 3.

Maybe the team was too excited in Sprint # 2 to realize life never becomes easy. Looking at the picture we took in the middle of Sprint # 3, I can still feel the pain the team was suffering at that time when we had to admit we could not deliver all the planned work.

Sprint # 4.

Things were becoming even worse. This picture was taken the last day of Sprint # 4. That day the team was really frustrated because we were hit by a significant failure: we failed to deliver most of the planned stories. For two consecutive Sprints that the team had missed our commitments. We spent 2 hours having a serious retrospective meeting to decide how we can adjust and catch up with the plan in the next Sprint.

Sprint # 5.

One action the team took was to communicate with our client honestly about the current problems the team was having. The client re-prioritized our Product Backlog so that we got extra time to clean up our technical debts in our Sprint # 5. Thankfully our client understood the team needed more time to learn and grow, although they might not have been that happy. Anyway the team learned from the failure and got extra time to fix the issues.

Sprint # 6.

The team worked extremely hard in Sprint # 5 and 6. Sprint # 5 was a milestone – we not only cleaned up our technical debt but also delivered several additional User Stories. By the end of that Sprint we were finally feeling that we were taking back control.

Sprint # 7.

I lost the picture of that Sprint.

Sprint # 8.

We were getting closer to the end of the project. As we often experience requirement changes started coming into our backlog. All the high priority User Stories on our Product Backlog have been delivered, now the client was adding changes almost every day. Managing those changes became the biggest headache for the Sprint.

Sprint # 9.

The additions in Spring 8 had been implemented. Only a few low priority stories left on our To-do list. The client was planning to throw them away directly and the team started doing regression testing again and again to make sure we deliver fewer bugs. The biggest lesson we learned in Sprint 9 was that we should have written enough automated functional test scripts so that we don’t need to be working over time until mid-night that Sprint.

Sprint # 10.

This was the last Sprint of this project. We’ve done enough tests, and we were very confident about the quality we delivered. The client was also satisfied. They were ready to do the big final Demo to the sponsor. Several key team members started taking vacation. They needed to compensate their families for those crazy days and nights they were staying in the office.

That is the typical life inside Perficient China office, full of happiness of experiencing new things every day, full of pain of dealing with different challenges and issues all the time, full of excitements of continuously learning and growing. I’m feeling lucky that these happen all the time in my life in this office.