Please take a look at some of the photos from the event. 

Below are a few issues that have been discussed: 

Abroad Parties

• - Statistics points out on 60% of failures in agile implementation for remotely located teams. However, there are big success stories.
• - Shifting sprint start from Sunday to mid-week works for other people too.
• - Estimating USs in Function Points (and not in man-days) makes the planning more effective (this was raised in the context of making sure that planning always ends within the given time slot).
• - Webcam in the scrum room is a reasonable way to provide visibility to all regardless of their location.
• - Rally's tool was warmly recommended by people who use it in practice (the demo at http://www.rallydev.com/products/lifecycle_management/ , indeed very impressive!). Also Jira was mentioned but not based on real experience. Using an electronic tool (in contradiction to the Scrum Manifesto ;-)) definitely resolves the visibility problem for virtual (remotely located) teams.

Team Leaders

• - Team Leaders mainly should continue serving as technological gurus in their areas of expertise - no matter to which scrum team they belong.
• - In many cases Team Leaders are responsible for sniffing/pre-planning: they are the first one who see the backlog and do all preparations for the planning.
• - In some cases scrum teams are organic team which run for long time, so Team Leaders function remains more or less the same.
• - If Team Leaders frustration comes solely from their hurt ego - they'd better to be taken out of scrum or even organization.

How adding QA to sprint:

Done - "Ready for QA" is not valid! - The best way to make sure QA is part of the sprint is to force completing a task only after QA - ready for release - any task that was not fully covered by QA should not be consider as "done".

QA is not just for QA: in case there are too much tasks that their coding was done - but were not tested, yet - all team should be recruited to test them.

Other disciplines (HW as an example) & Agile

The case: Our company runs it's 1^st Agile Scrum pilot with an interdisciplinary team. The team consists of SW, QA, HW guys, SM and PO. 1^st Sprint retrospective raised several issues:

• A) None of sprint goals achieved.
• B) HW Discipline guys do not believe in Agile.

The following feedbacks were raised:

• 1) In the 1^st Sprint you usually do not reach to spring goal. Need several sprints to calibrate the team, goals and velocity.
• 2) In the 1^st sprints need to define easily achievable goals. Preferably many small goals rather than few big ones.
• 3) The whole team has to go through a serious preparation. A few hours preparation by a fresh SM is not satisfactory. Need to build confidence in the group.
• 4) One of the claims of the HW group was: "Everything was good with the previous method. Why are we changing the method now?". This is a marker for a group that does not realize its position. Before going Agile - need to clarify to the team the basic motivation for that.

נושאים נוספים שהועלו:

• המשך עבודה ב-Scrum  יום לפני/אחרי קיצוצים
• דינאמיות: החלפת Scrum Master
• היעדרות Scrum Master
• מהירות מול דוקומנטציה
• תפקיד ה- QA ב- Scrum
• איך משלבים QA ו- RD
• אוטומציה של תהליכי Scrum - להקלה על המשתמשים ולחסכון בעלויות לארגון
• כלים לבדיקות אוטומטיות
• Team Forming
• תכנון ספרינטים
• תפקיד המנהל
• Scrum Masters עסוקים יותר מדי בלדבר ואין מי שיכתוב הערות והנחיות
• האם אפשר לעבור ל- Scrum  בהדרגה ואיך
• הורות קשה?
• מאיפה מתחילים
• Multiple teams on the same product
• תלויות
• Comparing mature teams