Scrum Show & Tell

Alternate Title: Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Software Project Management, I Learned in First Grade

Continuous process improvement is a primary objective for the software engineering team at Koders. They have done a fantastic job of adopting many Agile/XP practises including pair programming, test driven development (TDD), and most recently Scrum.

One of the challenges of scrum has been finding the best format for our daily scrum meetings. Our team has found that the rapid-fire, standing, 15 minute scrums are good for clarifying blocking issues and improving team collaboration, but don't necessarily provide management with enough detail on the true progress of specific tasks.

To help compensate for this shortcoming, our team has adopted Show & Tell sessions which are conducted 2-3 times per week. Koders Show & Tell sessions follow this format:

• 2-3 developers are selected to show their most recent projects
• each demo may include a user-facing demo, code review, and/or test results
• the demo is conducted with text chat and a screen sharing application, so other stakeholders can easily participate

The demos have proved invaluable for our team. Some of the most visible beneficial improvements include:

• better visibility of engineering progress
• virtual elimination of 'ivory tower' engineering tendencies
• multiple opportunities for management and team feedback before task completion
• inaccurate estimates and incorrect task scoping is identified early

Is your agile development team using frequent demos or show & tell sessions? How is it working for you? What format are you using?

Links:

• Screen sharing tools: GotoMeeting by Citrix