SCRUM

Purpose

Countable uses Scrum to manage work delivery and collaboratively learn about problem domains.

Scope

This page briefly summarizes SCRUM principles, then focuses on how we actually put it into action at Countable.

For more, check out the guide book from the inventor of Scrum here.

Principles

  1. Ship work to real users and get feedback every sprint. Don’t allow “work in progress” to not be released. Instead, plan your work so it can be released every 2 weeks or ideally, every day.
  2. Make sure everyone’s clear regarding their Objectives and team members’ Objectives and Key Results.
  3. Communicate with your project team daily about meeting KRs.

User Stories

User Stories serve as the central planning document for any given project. The purpose of User Stories is to ensure all stakeholders can understand what we’re trying to accomplish, no matter their level of technical expertise. Check out the User Stories page for more detail and how to compose User Stories.

SCRUM Process

Project Objective and Key Results

Every team should have one or more Objectives. This is a written goal discussed with the team to ensure clarity, and is used by the Product Owner to order the Backlog. An objective may be to meet a particular User Story.

Sprint

A sprint is a period (1 week to 1 month) punctuated by a Sprint meeting.

The Scrum Master must review tickets for clarity (triage them) from Requests to Backlog. The Product Owner must review tickets for priority (order the Backlog).

Before Sprint Review meetings, team members should:

  1. Measure what % done our Key Results are. Check any metrics necessary so we don’t bog down the meeting looking in mixpanel for example.
  2. Pick cards for the next sprint that will most impact KRs.

During the sprint meeting

Each team member updates the team on their

  1. Key Result scores
  2. what they shipped to cause those changes
  3. and how they will meet the Key Results by the deadline (usually end of month)

Cards of Shame

  1. Review any cards left in the sprint column. Why are they there? How can we avoid that?

Stand-up Meetings

Countable doesn’t hold synchronous stand-up meetings. Instead, every day, please share something on your team’s public slack channel regarding the work you did. It’s best to show a screenshot of your work for feedback.

SCRUM Roles

These are the duties we must assigned when doing Scrum.

Product Owner

  • Develops User Stories by talking to real users and ensures those users’ needs are being met by the team.
  • Clarifies how to achieve our Key Results, while taking input from team.
  • Triage the Trello Requests column into an Ordered Backlog of work.
  • Makes sure items in the backlog are clear to developers. The product owner is typically our client.

Scrum Master

  • Chair the sprint meeting, ensuring we follow the process.
  • Trains the team on Scrum and makes sure we’re following the rules of scrum effectively (shipping each week, continuously learning, making tickets clear)
  • Nudge team to identify problems in workflow and make them visible to work together.

Developers (and other technicians)

  • Ensures they have a challenging yet doable amount of work each sprint.
  • Ensure they understand items in their sprint, an complain otherwise.
  • Takes responsibility for completing KRs, and shipping work to real users, clients, and team members (depending on output)

Backlog

The Backlog is a list of all the actions we current believe will accomplish the goal of our project. This should be ordered by impact to effort ratio. That is, items which make the biggest difference in the least time should be done first.

We do not have daily stand-up meetings since our team works in different timezones. Instead, we have a slack channel where people should communicate about what they’re working on, coordinate code reviews, and figure out logistics to ship their work every week, and generate ideas for the sprint plan meeting.

For a visual aid of how our work is processed, see this Business Process Diagram.

Note: Instead of just talking about what did you do this week, try to use a screen share feature to walk along all of your “done” trello tickets, explaining one by one. This helps the team to better understand all of your work.