Discussion of SW Development using SCRUM

Dan Rawsthorne | 1 Jan 2009 02:48

Re: Product Owner overtasked by Scrum?

Well said. The Product Owner is the accountable person, but the team is 
responsible for doing the work. It's a self-organization thing...

Dan Rawsthorne, PhD, CST
Senior Coach, Danube Technologies
dan <at> danube.com, 425-269-8628

Adam Sroka wrote:
>
> On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Ron Jeffries <ronjeffries <at> acm.org 
> <mailto:ronjeffries%40acm.org>> wrote:
> > Hello, Adam. On Wednesday, December 31, 2008, at 12:18:05 PM, you
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Well, I think the PO is responsible for "acceptance". However, it
> >> would be nice if we involved an actual user somewhere... and maybe
> >> someone who knew a thing about testing... This is why, in the XP
> >> community, we stopped talking about "Customer" as a singular entity
> >> and started saying "Whole Team." Quite a while ago, in fact 
> >
> > Customer is a Role. Whole Team is a practice. They aren't
> > interconvertible.
> >
>
> Customer is a role. "Onsite Customer" /was/ a practice. Whole Team is
> a newer practice which was borrowed from LSD. Once "Whole Team" was
> introduced as a practice we stopped talking about "Onsite Customer" as
> a practice, because "Whole Team" better captured what we were trying
> to say. It's true, nonetheless, that a lot of us used to think of
> "Customer" as an individual representative on the team, and many of us

(Continue reading)

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Vikrama Dhiman | 1 Jan 2009 07:37

Re: Product Owner overtasked by Scrum?

IMHO, any reasonable size project would not allow "The Product Owner" to perform "All UAT Testing" herself as well as specify "all of what the system should be".

Product Owner is supposed to one point contact for the team for feedback, prioritization and explanation. She can rely on a battery of testers, analysts, marketing executives if she feels like that.

I am a Product Owner and my team consists of analysts and marketing people. I treat my role as one where I know everything that has gone, should go and is going on in my product. I do know that the product will become huge in not so near future and then "my product" will be a part of "overall product" - but thats a problem for another day.

Thanks

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--- On Thu, 1/1/09, Adam Sroka <adam.sroka <at> gmail.com> wrote:

From: Adam Sroka <adam.sroka <at> gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [scrumdevelopment] Product Owner overtasked by Scrum?
To: scrumdevelopment <at> yahoogroups.com
Date: Thursday, January 1, 2009, 4:49 AM

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Ron Jeffries <ronjeffries <at> acm.org> wrote:
> Hello, Adam. On Wednesday, December 31, 2008, at 12:18:05 PM, you
> wrote:
>
>> Well, I think the PO is responsible for "acceptance" . However, it
>> would be nice if we involved an actual user somewhere... and maybe
>> someone who knew a thing about testing... This is why, in the XP
>> community, we stopped talking about "Customer" as a singular entity
>> and started saying "Whole Team." Quite a while ago, in fact
>
> Customer is a Role. Whole Team is a practice. They aren't
> interconvertible.
>

Customer is a role. "Onsite Customer" /w as/ a practice. Whole Team is
a newer practice which was borrowed from LSD. Once "Whole Team" was
introduced as a practice we stopped talking about "Onsite Customer" as
a practice, because "Whole Team" better captured what we were trying
to say. It's true, nonetheless, that a lot of us used to think of
"Customer" as an individual representative on the team, and many of us
don't think of "Customer" that way any more.

"Product Owner" is much the same. "Product Owner" is an individual on
the team. The need to represent "Customer" is bigger than that one
individual, however, and I think that the Product Owner is the final
gatekeeper of that but the "whole" Scrum Team is responsible.

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Florence Chabanois | 1 Jan 2009 13:29

Re : Re: Product Owner overtasked by Scrum?

Hi everyone,

We have two products owner, one of them knows very little about software development. At the beginning, she was coming to the retrospective but as a matter of fact, she was not needed and she got bored. She is not coming anymore. Yet our door is still open, she may come if she wants and we will invite her again if there is a point to.

The other PO is more IT oriented and is the one making the fitnesse tests. He always come to the retrospective and fully belongs to the team (all of us are scrum masters, in turns). Since two iterations, he was less and less making the tests because, well, there was vacations and sometimes it was just faster for us to do it. We realize in our last retrospective that we were "losing ourselves" and this is the PO who mentionned it.

I guess when the level of trust is high, it is really good to have the PO join the retrospective and if there is a problem even with him, it is good to be able to talk about it (everyone being protected by the restrospective rules : not to attack anyone etc). There can also be problem between developers, would that mean that we should exclude developers from the retrospective?.... If there are problems, I would want to invite them even more. But before, actions should be done to make people feel safe enough to find solutions instead of throwing rocks.

Happy New Year to everyone !
Florence.

De : Felix <faruessel <at> arcor.de>
À : scrumdevelopment <at> yahoogroups.com
Envoyé le : Mercredi, 31 Décembre 2008, 14h52mn 07s
Objet : [scrumdevelopment] Re: Product Owner overtasked by Scrum?

--- In scrumdevelopment <at> yahoogroups.com, "David H." <dmalloc <at> ...> wrote:
> Odd. To me the Product Owner clearly is NOT part of the team.
> Therefore he/she is forbidden to be a part of the classical end of
> iterration retrospective.

I am a PO with a team of five developers. With my background as
developer and project manager I feel like part of the team. I am
available for the developer team nearly all the time and sometimes I
just take some time to hang around in the dev team room to get a
feeling how the developers are feeling at the moment. His has proven
to be a very good investment to build up trust. We usually have a very
open communication even in difficult times when I have got the feeling
that the developers work is quite protected by the Scrum rules while
my work as PO is becoming a damn tough one.

I am normally attending the retrospectives (and all other Scrum
meetings) especially if I feel like that there were special events
during the sprint. As I have sometimes too much work to do I can
expect to hear complains about quality of stories in the retrospective
and the developers have all rights to do this. I am usually
complaining about bad deployment skills and bad test coverage when we
run into some problems (bugs) that should have been discovered before.
I don't attend the retro in case I get the feedback from the team that
nothing special has happened. In this case the team and the SM are
doing the usual stuff, mostly talking about technical stuff.

IMHO the PO is definitively part of the Scrum team. However not all
POs work the same way because of their different background.

Felix
--
www.armerkater.de

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Ron Jeffries | 1 Jan 2009 15:47

Re: Product Owner overtasked by Scrum?

Hello, Marko.  On Wednesday, December 31, 2008, at 7:03:16 AM, you
wrote:

> Retrospective Meeting is not mandatory for PO, probably the most of
> this meeting will be about tech details, few about organization and
> few about human issues, but by my opinion visiting these meetings
> bonds in Scrum Team would be deeper.

Some issues that seem quite common in retrospectives, bearing on the
PO:

  - had too much to do;
  - did not clearly understand story;
  - did not know how to test story;
  - could not find anyone to ask a question;
  - story was done but could not demo it,
    when demo'd turned out to be wrong;

Software development using Scrum is a dance involving PO and
developers. Retrospecting half the pair doesn't really cover the
important stuff.

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
www.xprogramming.com/blog
A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest. -- Paul Simon

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David H. | 1 Jan 2009 15:54

Re: Product Owner overtasked by Scrum?


2009/1/1 Ron Jeffries :
> Hello, Marko. On Wednesday, December 31, 2008, at 7:03:16 AM, you
> wrote:
>
>> Retrospective Meeting is not mandatory for PO, probably the most of
>> this meeting will be about tech details, few about organization and
>> few about human issues, but by my opinion visiting these meetings
>> bonds in Scrum Team would be deeper.
>
> Some issues that seem quite common in retrospectives, bearing on the
> PO:
>
> - had too much to do;
> - did not clearly understand story;
> - did not know how to test story;
> - could not find anyone to ask a question;
> - story was done but could not demo it,
> when demo'd turned out to be wrong;
>
> Software development using Scrum is a dance involving PO and
> developers. Retrospecting half the pair doesn't really cover the
> important stuff.
>
For a sensible and precise interchange of information to happen the
Product Owner does not have to be present for the Retrospective.
That has nothing to do with hiding information or not trying to be
open and honest, this is simply a matter of streamlining the amount of
data being shared.
One of the key ingredients of any retrospective is to come up with a
very precise "plan" on the key issues the team feel they need to
improve most on. Many teams I know use S.M.A.R.T and that seems to
work well for them. If there is a root cause for a particular such
goal which is nested with the Product Owner it can be shared very
precisely and quickly by only addressing that particular point.

I am all for exploratory communication and I believe that passive
observation of a third parties communication flow can yield enormous
insight, however that is not the thing that should be happening in a
Retrosoective.
I am passionate about retrospectives and I respect their value, as
mentioned before in the past six years I have never had a PO directly
attend a Retrospective and so far it all has worked out pretty well
for those people I either consulted for or worked with as an employee.

Your mileage will vary, I can only state that this has worked very
well for me.
On a side note, this does not mean I "isolate" the PO. Frequent, open
and honest communication is encouraged on a day to day basis, just not
in the Retrospective.
> Ron Jeffries
> www.XProgramming.com
> www.xprogramming.com/blog
> A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest. -- Paul Simon
>
> 

--
Sent from gmail so do not trust this communication.
Do not send me sensitive information here, ask for my none-gmail accounts.

"Therefore the considerations of the intelligent always include both
benefit and harm." - Sun Tzu

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Peter Stevens | 1 Jan 2009 16:51

[POLL] Does the Product Owner Participate in your Sprint Retrospectives

Hi everyone,

I thought the discussion about P-O's and Sprint Retrospectives was pretty interesting. I'm curious what teams really do. To that end, I have set up a poll:

Does the Product Owner Participate in Your Sprint Retrospectives?

Always - as a full participant
Always - as a silent participant
Sometimes - by invitation
Sometimes - if s/he is around
Never

Click here to vote

As always, I will summarize the results in a week or so...

Thanks & Cheers,

Peter
-- Peter Stevens, CSM, CSP www.tinyurl.com/Scrum-In-House-Training www.scrum-breakfast.com tel: +41 44 586 6450 __._,_.___

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Ron Jeffries | 2 Jan 2009 00:01

Re: Re: Story points and estimation

Hello, aacockburn.  On Monday, December 15, 2008, at 11:00:28 AM,
you wrote:

> I just don't really want to be hearing the technical people saying,
> "It's higher business value to knock down this risk now." And then them
> arguing what the numerator in the BV equation is. What usually is
> operating is how much the PO trusts the person with the ashen white face
> and trembling voice.

Yes, business value is the PO's call. And IMO the PO should consider
reduction of risk as having "business value".

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
www.xprogramming.com/blog
I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way.  -- Jessica Rabbit

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Chet Hendrickson | 2 Jan 2009 19:46

Re: Re: Story points and estimation

Hello Ron,

For this to happen, doesn't the PO need some way to evaluate risk without undue developer interference. With 'undue' being the operative word.

chet

Thursday, January 1, 2009, 6:01:09 PM, you wrote:

Yes, business value is the PO's call. And IMO the PO should consider

reduction of risk as having "business value".

Ron Jeffries

www.XProgramming.com

www.xprogramming.com/blog

I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way. -- Jessica Rabbit

--

Best regards,

Chet mailto:lists <at> hendricksonxp.com

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Adam Sroka | 2 Jan 2009 20:06

Re: Re: Story points and estimation

On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Chet Hendrickson
<lists <at> hendricksonxp.com> wrote:
> Hello Ron,
>
> For this to happen, doesn't the PO need some way to evaluate risk without
> undue developer interference.  With 'undue' being the operative word.
>
> chet
>

Aren't there really two kinds of risk here? There's business risk and
there's technical risk. It is up to the PO to think about business
risk and whether to accept such risk by increasing the priority, defer
it by reducing the priority, or mitigate it by changing/breaking-up
the story. It's up to developers to think about technical risk and
deal with uncertainties by increasing estimates or insisting on
spikes. If we keep these roles straight I'm not sure how the influence
could be "undue."

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Chet Hendrickson | 2 Jan 2009 21:36

Re: [good] Re: Re: Story points and estimation

Hello Adam,

Friday, January 2, 2009, 2:06:54 PM, you wrote:

I believe there is only business risk, or at least only one we should care about. If a technical issue has no impact on the ability of the project to deliver business value, why should we care about it.

It is the responsibility of the technical people to put the risks they see into terms the PO can understand and value. The undue interference comes about when the PO defers to them without understanding for themselves.

chet

On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Chet Hendrickson

>

Aren't there really two kinds of risk here? There's business risk and

there's technical risk. It is up to the PO to think about business

risk and whether to accept such risk by increasing the priority, defer

it by reducing the priority, or mitigate it by changing/breaking-up

the story. It's up to developers to think about technical risk and

deal with uncertainties by increasing estimates or insisting on

spikes. If we keep these roles straight I'm not sure how the influence

could be "undue."

--

Best regards,

Chet mailto:lists <at> hendricksonxp.com

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