[PLUG-Devel] Scrum anyone?

[Josh Coffman]

Funny thing is... I'm not a big proponent of XP either. Btw, Darrin makes good points in his response too. 
I've come from background of front-loading the design followed by traditional coding and testing phases.
..and I can see how in some situations that would be a better approach.

We are using Agile-ish practices but definitely not certain aspects of XP per se. For instance, none of us are fans of the
pair-coding idea. We all work from home anyway.

The stuff we do, some of which is also from Scrum, are:

1) short daily meetings to share status
2) an open queue of dev tasks free for someone to pick up; and also certain assigned tasks because specialization is unavoidable.
3) evolutionary releases instead of revolutionary leaps.
4) test-driven development
5) continuous integration of changes into dev builds

4 & 5 we are still working on. Unit testing is great but we're still figuring out how to do that with the web portions of our code.
We are just getting out CI system up and going, and still need to implement auto-deploying builds to the dev environment. 
We do use it for builds though.



-j


----- Original Message ----
From: Alan Dayley <alandd at consultpros.com>
To: List for Linux development and software engineering discussions. <plug-devel at lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us>
Sent: Saturday, December 30, 2006 4:13:27 PM
Subject: Re: [PLUG-Devel] Scrum anyone?

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

In my current work environment there is very little chance of
implementing XP.  I'm not a proponent of XP.  However, Scrum != XP.  I
think Scrum would be good for our work and I would have a chance of
getting permission to implement it.  In fact, I could implement a lot of
it without telling anyone it is part of an overall system, if needed.

Our situation is a little different.  We produce and sell hardware.  So
the product has embedded code that is highly dependent on the hardware
design.  Even testing code, etc. is dependent on hardware (product, test
fixtures, etc.)  I'm not sure how doing software with Scrum will
integrate with hardware development.  All the documentation talks about
Scrum as a purely software methodology.

But, several of the presentations discuss the principles have been
applied at Toyota for many years.  Toyota obviously designs hardware.
So, I have hope that it can work in our environment.

Alan

Josh Coffman wrote:
> Scrum is an Agile like practice. Personally I've found that the software approach that works best varies by market and type of project.
> IE: Agile isn't good for software that runs Nuclear Facilities due to the regulation and risk from a catastrophe. However, it works pretty well in 
> web based projects and internal products. I'm still learning this stuff and how to apply what and when.
> 
> Kent Beck has good XP books; I'm not sure about anything specific to Scrum.
> 
> -j
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Alan Dayley <alandd at consultpros.com>
> To: List for Linux development and software engineering discussions. <plug-devel at lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us>
> Sent: Saturday, December 30, 2006 3:24:46 PM
> Subject: [PLUG-Devel] Scrum anyone?
> 
> After hearing some netcasts and watching some of the "TechTalks" on
> Google video, I am becoming very interested in Scrum.
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28development%29)
> 
> Aside from the videos I have also found some good documentation and
> presentations from various sources.  While I feel like I am learning
> much, I have no practical application experience.
> 
> So, who here uses scrum?  What is good?  What is bad?
> 
> I am willing to drive a discussion of the topic at the January 4th Devel
> Meeting next week, unless someone else has another topic they'd like to
> present.  It'd be good to have people who use it present in the discussion.
> 
> Alan
> 

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFFlvKXDQw/VSQuFZYRAmrZAJsHcBnSnS8TRhUze2YCpendp/2i7QCeOv0N
bFM445ZHSCN+rRaN3Lg3+1E=
=Jmsd
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
_______________________________________________
PLUG-devel mailing list  -  PLUG-devel at lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-devel




__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com