First Impression

We met problems soon, on the first day after the planning. Nobody wanted to participate on daily meetings. Team members had remembered their first, so called agile project. Then they had spent hours on daily scrum, as nobody had known that we had been working in Scrum. It had been mere wasting expensive development time. But, I insisted on these meetings. I promised to keep 15 minute time box. These meeting lasted no less than 20 minutes and no more than 35. It was still more than prescribed. The source of the problem was that we often discussed technical problems. I tried to stop such discussion, but, I did not want to discourage them. I allowed expressing their thought and only after some minutes, I stopped them.

Our first iteration was impressive and interesting for all of us.

After the end of the iteration, the team gathered to discuss how we had been working. For me, it was very successful two weeks. Six errors with higher priority were corrected and installed. There was a long way to go, but our customer was happy. The customer saw the light at the end of the tunnel and started to believe in Kanban. I thanked the effective work of the team. It was cool to see their happy faces.

The retrospective continued with the discussion of the use of the daily meetings. Much to my astonishment, the team decided that daily meetings were useful and we had to keep them on the next iteration as well. Of course, they had remark about the length of the meetings. We had to reduce it to 15 minutes.

Of course, the technical problem had to be discussed. However, there was no space of such discussions of the daily meetings. The solution was obvious. If anybody had a problem, then it was discussed after the daily meetings. Such way only the necessary personnel was involved and the remaining part of the team could continue their work.

During the iteration, we had to organize a meeting in order to select a new task from the product backlog. It caused undesired delay in the development process as everybody had to interrupt the coding and went to a meeting. In accordance with the measured performance of the team, the limit on the selected for sprint tasks was raised from 5 to 6.

On the second two week iteration 7 more tasks were finished. The length of the daily meetings was decreased but we still did not reach the required 15 minutes. Otherwise, Kanban style seemed to work well.