[gchucky]

I'm on a team that started doing Scrum a few months ago, and we're still figuring it out.

To be clear: are you saying that the one team that did Scrum well did so because they spent more time on the process? Reading what you wrote, spending two full days every two weeks to plan sounds, well, terribly dragged out. Does it feel like the time was well spent, or was it a slog?

[forgotmypw]

It did not seem dragged out, it was just thorough, and reasonably un-rushed. It was somewhat tiring, but definitely worth it.

By the end of the planning meeting, we had a clear idea of what we were going to accomplish, and a reasonable amount of confidence that we considered all the tasks that went into our plan.

Because when a story was, e.g. "add addresses to the clients page", it was broken down, discussed, thought out, and agreed upon. The moments when I discovered, oh shit, this story will actually take 10 hours longer than I had allocated, and now I have to stay until 10PM two days this week to meet my committment. Because our story points were approximately an hour each, and almost every story was broken down until there were no tasks more than 3 points each, 1 or 2 preferred.

It was all thanks to our scrum-master/project manager, who had actually spent a lot of time learning about scrum/agile/kanban/etc, read many books on it, and most of all, was committed to doing it right.

I think our sprints were a bit longer than 2 weeks.

[jpollock]

I had a similar experience, where we would spend at a full day every sprint planning the sprint (team of 5).

During the project, it felt like a bit of a waste. We were spending a full 10% of our time on project management. However, looking back, I see that a) it seems to match up with other's experience, and b) it's pretty much the same amount of overhead for project management that the project would have had using any methodology.

At least with the 1-2 days every 2 weeks everyone sees it and it's something you can get better at. I'll take that over magical GANTT charts any day.

[brazzy]

> are you saying that the one team that did Scrum well did so because they spent more time on the process?

Creating fine-grained, detailed user stories and making sure that everyone understand them and agrees on the prioritization is not time spent on "the process", it's requirements engineering.

[forgotmypw]

I just read your comment again, and I want to add this to my other reply:

I would say the top, most useful, make-or-break practice that I would say is most essential to Scrum succeeding is a combination of:

* 1 point ≈ 1 hour of work

and

* no task above 3 points, try to only have 1-point tasks

Coincidentally, this process is what took the longest in our planning meetings, because the coders sat down and planned out the tasks, kind of the way you would in an algorithms course.

The payoff is that our estimates, after the first couple of sprints, were dead on, and there was very little "discovered work" mid-sprint. No midnight oil. And no corner-cutting.