End of the first sprint!

Last Thursday we finished our first applicative sprint .There was another sprint (sprint 0) that focused on infrastructure and on the building of the skeleton of our application. Today we had two summary meetings about finishing the sprint: Sprint review meeting and Sprint Retrospective meeting.

You probably ask yourself:

• What are the purposes of those meetings?
• What are the goals of those meeting?
• What is the different between these two meetings?
• How those meeting can help me?
• Are these meetings a waste of time?

Please relax, I'll explain everything…

I'll start with the sprint review meeting. The main goal of the sprint review meeting is to present the project status on the end of the sprint. We usually invite managers, product owners, users and everyone who are interested to see the project progress.

For a good brainstorm we should demonstrate the product functionality (only a complete work that we committed at the beginning of the sprint). It will help us to clarify the items that will add on the next sprint.

On those meetings the team should talk about what went wrong and what went right on the last sprint.

The second meeting is the Retrospective. The main goal of the retrospective meeting is to look back on last sprint, and to think together how can we improve our enjoyable and productive work on the next sprint? The sprint review looks at "What" the team is building whereas the Retrospective looks at "How" they are building. In this meeting the team can talk about all the things that affect on the product development.

Daily Scrum meeting:

We have a daily meeting every morning in our office. Those meeting are managed by the scrum master(Shani Raba - the second team leader or me). In those meeting the scrum master is asking the team members (one person talks at a time) 3 questions:

1. What did to you do since the last Daily Scrum meeting?
2. What will you intend to do between now and the next Daily Scrum meeting?
3. What are the obstacles that can hit your productivity?

There is no place to questions about design, architecture, specifications and etc in those meeting.

The project manager and the product owner are invited to those meetings but they can't talk.

Working with Scrum methodology is starting…

I started a new job (my second job as team leader) in a new project(One project with two teams).

We decided to develop our project with the scrum methodology.

Scrum is one of the agile methodologies, which focus on some major things like:

• Quick response to a competition.
• The ability to develop quickly, high priority staffs for your costumer in maximum productivity.

I'll write some posts on this subject in the next few months.

Our project started officially in the beginning of this year. In the first spirit (we called it "Infrastructure spirit") we organize our new office, open a new solution and decided on the relevant architecture and infrastructure that we'll going to use in our project.

Our main technology is .Net v2.0 with GIS engine (of ESRI Company).