Ryan Rinaldi

Today is day 3 of our first Sprint. Yesterday was our first Daily Scrum and so far I’m digging it but I don’t have enough experience to really know if Scrum “is working” yet.

When we were doing our Sprint Planning meeting it became exceptionally clear to me that it’s really, really hard to create 4-16 hour tasks when a lot of a Sprint involves research & prototyping.  We are working on implementing an Enterprise Service Bus and for this first Sprint a lot of us have to spend some time just learning the tooling.  How do you plan tasks effectively when you have no real idea how long something is going to take?  We wound up actually trying to plan how we will go about doing our research and how long we will spend on prototypes but it just feels like those sprint tasks are wild ass guesses. 

In the future I’m going to advocate that we break the 4-16 hour task rule when we don’t know the potential solution and use “Spikes”, “Tracer Bullets”, and “Research” to wrap our heads around the Product Backlog before we do a Sprint Planning.