Sprint Planning week

We follow an Agile process here at Tableau and one of my roles in that is scrum master.  Those links are pretty good overview sites if this is not familiar to you.  Jump over there and read a little about this if you want.

We follow a 2 week sprint cycle here and this was our planning week.  Nothing too out of the ordinary with this - we decide what work items we will complete in the next 2 weeks, assign out some of them to get started and decide what we will demonstrate  at the end of the cycle.  The hardest part of this is usually deciding what to demo to everyone who is interested.  In this cycle, we want to demo a tool one of the testers wrote that generates random data that follows a desired distribution, and we have some cluster work we also want to show.

For me, the hardest part as scrum master is usually trying to find a room in which to meet :)  We moved into a new building at the beginning of the month so getting a room this time was a bit easier since the rooms are mostly unbooked right now. 

For the next 2 weeks we will work on the items we decided to do, update our progress daily and meet daily at standups.  One new tactic we are trying for standup meetings is to update per project item, rather than by person.  In the past, each person on the team has provided an update for what has happened for that person in the last 24 hours, but we are changing that to be more project based.  So far it is going well.

Again, nothing earth shattering here but I wanted to give a very broad overview into a typical day at Tableau.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John