Odeon Scrums - How We Roll
In general
Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for project management and agile software development. The main purpose of the scrum is to see the progress of a project, in terms of issues solved and issues to be solved. Scrums allow quick adapting to changes and review of progress, which is a main topic of the Agile Manifesto.
Our methodology
Because we’re a distributed team, communication is very sensitive. Actually, communication is one of the most important ingredients to the success of a team, no matter the model.
In Odeon, our structure is flat, so everybody takes responsibility for his actions. To keep ourselves focused on the reason why we’re coding, we all take part in the communication with clients. We have scrums with our full team + clients in a range between 2 times a week to everyday. Each of these scrums has a Scrum Master, which has the role of ensuring a good communication flow, that everybody sticks to the subjects and scrums don’t drag over-time.
Aside from scrums with clients, each day at 5pm Singapore time (12pm Romania, 11am Italy) we have an internal scrum when we go over the current progress. To be more precise, we evaluate issues in Uberkode, our issue tracker. Uberkode can be accessed by anyone of our team or by the clients at any time, to get a full report of what's going on.
The tricky part
Because communication is important and the client is always aware how his project is evolving, we need to have discipline when updating progress on issues. To ensure issues are updated and time is tracked properly, we came up with an original approach. Instead of a developer presenting what he has worked on, he presents what his colleague worked on, based on time tracked and issues updated. As a result of the scrum all the issues are fully updated with DONEs and TODOs and time is accurately tracked.
This has helped us find quickly the pressure points in projects and allows for fast feature-creep detection. Now you know what we're up to at 5pm :)
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Category: Communication
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