PalDev Scrum Night with Kiril Vassilve

It was been a while since the last time I wrote a blog post. -this post stuck in my drafts for 3 weeks!!- I will try to push myself to blog more often.

Last month May 26th PalDev brought Kiril Vassilve -AerData- to the stage, to talk about his life experience applying Scrum in a distributed team. Kiril has 17 years for experience in Software development industry. He worked with a Palestinian team from Equiom MENA – a software outsourcing house based in Ramallah- for the last 4 years. Equiom as well as an increasing number of the Palestinian IT firms are doing software development outsourcing for customers from US and Europe.It was very good chance for the developers community to hear from a person who was applying Scrum in similar condition for a good amount of time.

Last year PalDev arranged a CSM training with James Coplien were a 28 members attended. Most of them were from companies that do outsourcing! Not so many could guide their colleges/firms to move towards applying Agile/Scrum .. I was thinking that bringing a person who made it there could help and will pack people with a good stories to tell to their manager.

Learning Scrum fundamentals does not always give you that knowledge of how things will go when you are out in real life. Applying a disciplined methodology while being exposed to all kind of obstacles & circumstance of real working environments could turn into big failure if you have no idea how to handle real issues. You will be afraid and have all kind of thoughts .. does this will work? what could go wrong? should we do this or do that?… Scrum is an open framework  .. it will not have answers of many of your questions. Because all of this, hearing and talking with community colleges who made this way through this experience will be a great resource of learning.

I started the meeting by a quick presentation “Scrum in a Nutshell” where I explained Scrum basics, Scrum roles, meetings and artifacts .. that was very good brief to show what Scrum is. Then our 2m tall Bulgarian friend Kiril took the stage and he started his presentation by talking about “What Scrum is NOT!” that was a good start since many of our audience who has been new to Scrum has all kind of ideas about his Scrum thing

Kiril has few slides to show then the discussion started, many of audience questions was arguing how Scrum could work! since the good amount of the audience are coming from waterfall background and another good amount is applying cowboy programming in their projects –which even worst than waterfall-

one of the most reasons that make Scrum fails is not having a good Product Owner aka PO who is able to write good user stories

One of the ideas Kiril stressed on is that one of the most reasons that make Scrum fails is not having a good Product Owner aka PO who is able to write good user stories. PO is a crucial role for the Scrum team and if the PO is not writing a good user stories this means the development team will face tough time and will waist his time doing the PO work. Another issue Kiril stressed on is that the management must have a basic understanding what Scrum is and how it works and they must have the commitment to apply such framework. The management shouldn’t have the idea that Scrum is something belongs to the development team only and they are free to interfere with the team work any time they need.

   

I believe the audience enjoyed the discussion since it was more like developers weeping! we were making fun of our managers, customers and business analysts ..etc who was turning our life harder by their un-disciplined acts .. we enjoyed that part

At the end  pizza was served and the audience continued their debate while they have their standup meeting

Finally I would like to thank gSoft Technology Solutions and Ramallah Chamber of Commerce & Industry for sponsoring this event.

Woof!