Agile – Making progress

I have been meaning to post this for a while but DDD SW got in the way so this is a catch up on the situation from my post Agile - Bringing it back on track, as promised I will be posting my ‘Pain Points & Resolutions’

So we had successfully completed the sprint and started our meetings, the team was a little more confident in what they were doing this time.

The demo to the various product owners went well the only niggle being that a member of the team was questioning if we should release a piece of work we had done as during the sprint the product owner had identified another story that they wanted done.  A small discussion ensued with the outcome being that the understanding that we will always deploy work done in a sprint, we don’t hold any work over until further work is done.

After the demo the retrospective went well with the team selecting items they wanted to focus on in the next sprint, the only point of contention being the manager who looked after the team started demanding items to be looked at and trying to change what had been selected by the team to focus on.  The team didn’t accept this and although uncomfortable for the manager the discussion that followed showed the team starting to self-manage and decide their own fate with the result being a small compromise with the team picking the items to focus on but acknowledging the managers concerns.

The sprint planning went fairly smoothly, the hours were calculated, the stories were ready with enough detail (thanks to the Scrum Masters backlog grooming) and the tasking went well.  Only issue we ran into was the team attempting to do more than was on story but fortunately when this was pointed out the team stopped.

So it looks like we’re making progress, I’ll post on what's been happening to the team after my series of posts on ‘Pain Points & Resolutions’.