Dominique Stender A blog about my thoughts and experiences in Information Technology

Attempting Scrum in a SDLC environment, pt. 2

In the first part of this article series, I covered the aspects of the real life office environment. This included the lack of physical space for pinboards etc. Go check it out.

In this second part I will focus more on the virtual environment, the tools typically used by a company following the traditional waterfall approach / SDLC and how you might still be able to use these tools for Scrum.

Bug tracking system

Let me start with the bug tracking system. Most likely your organization will have one of those. Typically issues can be categorized, prioritized and assigned to a person as well as tagged or grouped into releases. To make this tool work for you in a more agile way you could create a couple of additional categories and put everything (!) into that system: Don't put only issues into it. Also add things like feature requests, enhancements, documentation, testing and refactoring tasks. I'm sure you can come up with more with a bit of thinking. Just be careful not to make this more complicated than required...

Well, that looks pretty much like a product backlog to me. You can do a printout of the overview and pin that to the board for better clarity. Stick it to the window with Scotch Tape if you don't have a pin board. In any case you should make this virtual backlog physical, otherwise the transparency will suffer. Only with a physical product backlog the team will have a clear idea about the big picture.

The overhead to maintain that printout would be minimal. You effectively avoid having two independent lists (in my experience always a recipe for disaster) and your not-so-agile management will probably be pleasantly surprised by the transparency you introduce.