Joe Little – Scrum workshop, 14 September in Bucharest

Scrum Team doing Planning during the Mosaic Works CSM class of September 2010

The Scrum Workshop is a must do if you are already a Certified Scrum Master and/or if you have experience working as a Scrum Master. Join Joe Little and walk through the most important parts of your job, preferably with your whole team, on your real project.

The Scrum Workshop is a very practical exercise applied on your real project, so the whole team should be present (including the Product Owner and even someone with financial information about the project). You can still get value from this exercise if you cannot do that.

Each Workshop is a little bit different. But the focus is on two things:

• Complete a good (decent) Release Planning for the real project or effort that the team is working on. It is best if the team is just starting the effort. And it is best if the team has access to all the people and resources to make the Release Planning effective. Release Planning includes (over-simplified): Vision, Product Backlog development, Business Value (points), Story Pointing, Risks-dependencies-other, Ordering the work, Deciding the scope-date trade-off, Budget. We also talk about infrastructure, architecture, and design (IAD)
• Complete a version of Sprint Planning. Over-simplified, this includes: Agreeing on the PBIs (product backlog items, or user stories) to commit to in the Sprint, and breaking the Stories into tasks. And fully committing. (I define this as: “We believe, 9 times out of 10, with the usual “stuff happens” around here, we can get all these stories done, in our best professional judgment. And maybe do more.”)

The Workshop is very important because it takes the “theory” of the course, and puts it into practice. So that the stark and real meaning of the ideas becomes so much clearer in the real world of the team’s real work.

The Workshop is done under the guidance of typically two very experienced coaches, who offer as much coaching as it’s appropriate, keeping in mind that too much advice can actually hurt beginners more than help them.

Read more about the class