Well, part of the whole idea is that scrum isn’t a hard-and-fast set of rules right? I had some meetings at another office last week which necessitated moving out our first sprint review and retrospective a couple days. So if one of the guiding principals of scrum (and agile in general) is that the dates don’t change, everything else does, that got blown right out of the gate.
Some new stories came up as part of the sprint wrap-up which means that we’ll need to do a new planning poker session. Also, some other things came up which mean that there is a bit of housekeeping to do before we start the second sprint. We’re now in some uncharted zone between two sprints while the product manager and scrum master do some cleanup while the scrum teams do some off-book work for a couple days. Yeah, not ideal, but we’re trying to get it back on track. This sprint was going to be a throw-away anyway as it involved a lot of transition and getting used to the framework.
The retrospective brought up some really good issues and some innovative suggestions from the team on how to handle them. If the suggestions work out, I’ll post them here eventually.
There are still some folks unclear on what we expect to gain by transitioning to a new development process, but most of the team is embracing it as a good experiment and chance to try something new. For the most part, everyone seems to have an open mind and that definitely makes a huge difference as we all try to figure this out together. It hasn’t been the smoothest transition, but so far so good, I think. We’re definitely not as productive as we were before (so far). However, I think that the discipline provided by the product backlog means that we are actually getting the most important things done first. That makes a huge difference.