Book Chapter Summary | Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time (New York, 2014) by Jeff Sutherland - Chapter Four: Time

Chapter Four: Time

Working in sprints allows a team to deliver something quickly for customer feedback, while the the daily "stand-up" allows teams to communicate efficiently.

Quick Summary
  • Break your work into small chunks that can be completed in a regular, set, short period (2-4 weeks) 
  • At the end of each short period or "Sprint", have something that's done and can be demonstrated to stakeholders 
  • One meeting a day - get together for fifteen minutes and identify how to speed things up

Main Points

There are two main elements of how a Scrum team works - the "sprint" and the "daily stand-up". A sprint is a time box of a set duration (e.g. two weeks). It also has to be consistent - you don't do a one-week sprint and then a three-week sprint.  At the end of the sprint, the team needs to deliver something that can be used by the customer. A key part of helping to team achieve this is the daily "stand-up". this is a 15-minute meeting held at the same time every day and attended by the whole team to improve team communication.

Chapter Overview

Working in sprints establishes a work rhythm so teams can know how much they can get done in a set period of time. A team commits to what they're going to accomplish in a sprint, and after than point nothing else can be added by anyone outside the team. The daily stand-up, meanwhile, helps a team improve it's communication. Every day at the same time, each team member is called upon to answer three questions:

  1. What did you do yesterday to help the team finish the Sprint?
  2. What will you do today to help the team finish the Sprint?
  3. What obstacles are getting in the team’s way?

Other interesting stuff

In the 1990s, Jim Coplien looked at hundreds of software projects, trying to figure out why a small minority went well while the majority were disasters. He found that "The greater the communication saturation—the more everyone knows everything—the faster the team." The daily-stand up is designed to increase communication saturation, but is often executed poorly. People have a tendency to treat the Daily Stand-up as status update “I did this … I’ll do that”. The more optimum approach is closer to a football huddle. A team member might say that a task will take a day, but another team member might know how to do it in an hour if they work together.

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