Mitali Monalisa & Srivathsan Bhargavi, Intel Corporation
The scrum process was developed for teams that handle the different functions of software product development as one organization. With the scope and size of products growing, these pieces are handled by distinct teams. It becomes imperative to understand how scrum processes can be tailored to best fit individual validation teams, which are primarily consumers of the deliverables from by the development teams. This paper talks about the best-known methods identified during the adoption of scrum by product validation teams. It provides a list of suggested tools, processes and communication mechanisms to maximize the benefits of scrum.
Results/Impacts and Lessons Learned:
- Scrum is very effective; it worked very well for us. Here are some team specific things that can work as best known methods for other software validation teams.
- Scrum encouraged frequent communication between Dev and QA teams. Although our teams were interacting even before we adopted Scrum, the two-week Sprint cycle forced individuals to interact on a daily basis.
- Adopting Scrum helped the organization in identifying the issues that existed in the way our team worked with external teams; where we constantly were in a fire-fighting mode to work with newer hardware, firmware and platform drivers. Scrum did not solve these issues for us, but helped surface many of these at an organizational level.
- Shorter sprint cycles helped us acknowledge the number of interrupts that the team was dealing with that affected planned deliverables; it also helped better identify external dependencies.
- Physical task boards worked extremely well for our teams since most of the team members were co-located. The daily face-to-face stand-ups acted as a forum for regular intra-team communication. The two-week long Sprint goals on the task board helped keep the team focused on the immediate team goals, while the Product backlog focused on the longer-term goals to be achieved.
- The team received intact training and was encouraged to follow all of the key scrum methodologies for at least 3 weeks.
2010 Poster Paper, Mitali Monalisa & Srivathsan Bhargavi, Abstract
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