Why Does Scrum Rock

Posted on by
Reply

Scrum is a framework that gives you a set of rules and principles that HELPS YOU to build software successfully. It is based on agile methodologies and unlike waterfall methodologies it works with small iterations, producing chunks of quality software faster and, ”hopefully” on time.

The success or failure of adopting scrum will depend in my opinion on three factors: The quality of the team (people), the expertise of the scrum master and the desire of the organization into adopt Scrum.

Complexity of software development

Software development is complex because there is not only one way to develop a piece of software; there is not only one technology that can be used or one management technique to be followed. Combinations of technologies, resource management, development techniques, architecture and methodologies to develop a system can be almost infinite.

One key aspect of the complexity of software development is the volatility of its requirements. Requirements are dynamic and can change, depreciate or can be created at any time during the lifecycle.

What if during the life cycle, market conditions change? New laws regulating some functions of the software change? Or the customer forgets a very granular functionality that is really hard to estimate without seeing the system in action? Including a change in the middle of the process could be quite expensive.

Software bloat

Have you heard about software bloat? Some failures in software engineering lie on mixing all required features in one big and unique iteration. Most of the time it implies a tremendous waste of development and support funding.  The deadlines are extended multiple times and the estimated budged is grossly exceeded.

Do you have a smartphone? How much of the whole functionality of that smart phone you REALY use on a daily basis? Really, how much? Probably less than 5% – 10%!

Why not focus on what really matter first and deliver it in small period of time?

Scrum helps you to solve the problem, giving you:

  • A set of rules to follow to produce the most important functionality first in short iterations.
  • Power to the team to take immediate decisions based on their skills.
  • A way to sort requirements that allow existing ones to mutate at any stage and new ones to be introduced.

How?

  1. Having short iterations provides you with a tool to inspect results in early stages. That inspection is enforced with “events” across the lifecycle of the iteration. The results of that inspection should produce an adaptation in towards to improve processes.
  2. Empowering teams to make its own decisions, decentralizing the decisions about how to develop software to people who are close to the work.
  3. Working on a sorted list of wishes based on “value” allows you to focus your effort in what really matters first.

These three key Scrum characteristics can be translated in 1) Events, 2) Team and 3) Artefacts.

How do Scrum events work?

Scrum has several events. The main one is the Sprint (iteration). The others are meetings designed to inspect processes and their results during the lifecycle of each sprint.

Scrum Events

Scrum Events

Planning MeetingThe first event in the cycle is the Planning Meeting. In that planning meeting, the team decides what functionality will be built during the next iteration. It is divided in two parts: a) The team picks the top functionality from a unique list of wishes (previously sorted by value) and forecasts what they will develop. b) The development team discusses how that functionality will be developed.

SprintImmediately after that meeting, the sprint starts. The sprint has duration between 1 to 4 weeks and the length of it is fixed across the duration of the whole project. In that event the development team “develops” all functionality required to produce a potentially deliverable piece of functionality based on what they selected and committed to do from the list of wishes, and based on a unique and shared definition of “done”.

Daily Scrum MeetingDuring that sprint a daily scrum meeting is always held in the same location and the same time. In that meeting all developers answer to themselves three basic questions: 1) What did I do yesterday?; 2) what will I do today?; and 3) what impediments do I have? If some discussion arises, it is parked and it is discussed after the meeting. This meeting has a duration of up to 15 minutes (enough for a development team of 9 members).

The Daily meeting is the event my customers like more and in my experience is one of the sales points of Scrum. They love the idea of having a daily self-inspection between themselves. If there are some impediments, those are raised and a mitigation plan is created afterwards. Don’t be confused. It is not a status meeting. This meeting is only for the development team.

Sprint Review MeetingWhen the sprint finishes at the date defined (It cannot be extended but it can be cancelled for extreme reasons) a sprint review meeting is held. In this meeting, the team discusses the result of the sprint, a demonstration of the piece of software is presented and it is indentified what has been “Done”. A decision of release the result of the sprint could be made.

Retrospective MeetingImmediately after the sprint review meeting, a sprint retrospective meeting is held. In that meeting, the team inspects itself in terms of people, relationships, process, and tools.  What went well is reinforced and a plan to implement improvements is created (including the review of the definition of “done”)

All events are mandatory and all of them are time-boxed to avoid extend discussions beyond reasonable durations. Scrum focuses on producing software not on bureaucracy.

What’s the scrum team, who is there?

Product OwnerProduct Owner

It is one person. He/she controls the destiny of the project. This guy decides two main things:

1. The order of the list of wishes (what will be developed next).
2. If the result of a sprint (increment) can be released.

Scrum MasterScrum Master

It is one person. He/she is the referee and the coach. This guy ensures scrum is understood and enacted, and this is done is by:

1. Teaching scrum.
2. Removing impediments.
3. Protecting the development team from interruptions.

Development TeamDevelopment Team

It is a group of “developers” with a size between 3 and 9 members. They are responsible for delivering what was committed as an increment. Their characteristics are:

1. They are able to make decisions about how to develop the increment without a central authority or a chicken imposing it.
2. Although they have different functional expertise, they work together toward a common goal.
3. No titles. Everybody has a “developer” role and everybody has the same responsibility (deliver what was committed as an increment).

Constraints:

  • Product Owner (PO) cannot be Scrum Master or Developer
  • Scrum Master cannot be Product Owner (PO) but he/she can be Developer

What are the scrum artefacts?

Artefacts are the result of the events. Scrum divides the artefacts into product backlog, sprint backlog, sprint progress and the increment.

Product Backlog

It is the list of wishes. It is unique and it is dynamic. Items inside of it are called Product Backlog Items (PBI) and they have information about the functionality to develop.

Product Backlog

Product Backlog

That list is sorted by the product owner based on value so top items are more valuable and are more detailed than items in the bottom. PBIs can be added, deleted or modified at any time so new requirements are welcomed at any time!

Sprint Backlog

It is a subset of PBIs extracted from the top of the Product Backlog and allocated into a sprint. It has the plan (list of tasks) about how to develop that functionality.

Sprint Backlog

Sprint Backlog

Sprint Progress

It is a set of reports (can be any you consider appropriate) that shows the progress of a sprint. The most popular reports are the sprint burndown, release burndown and velocity.

Increment

It is the goal of all this confusion. It is the result of what the development team did, consistent with what they understood was required, and aligned with the sprint goal and the unique definition of “done”.

All those artefacts need to be visible and transparent to all the Team.

To Sum Up

Scrum is not a silver bullet. It will not guarantee you the success of your project. It is just a tool that helps you to increase the probability of success on complex software developments.

Scrum excels on it because it works with short iterations, it focuses on most valuable functionality first, on delivering software and on decentralising decisionmaking to avoid bureaucracy.

If you have a good skilled team, an experienced scrum master and the desire of the organization to adopts Scrum, the probability of success will be higher. So, what are you waiting for? Scrum it!

About me

Detecting which edition of SharePoint 2010 is installed

Posted on by
Reply

SharePoint 2010 has several editions:

  • SharePoint Foundation 2010
  • Search Server Express 2010
  • SharePoint Server 2010 Standard Trial
  • SharePoint Server 2010 Standard
  • SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Trial
  • SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise
  • Search Server 2010 Trial
  • Search Server 2010
  • Project Server 2010 Trial
  • Project Server 2010
  • Office Web Companions 2010

Some times your customers require the use of InfoPath forms or Federated Search in their SharePoint servers, so it is esential determine if their SharePoint version support these features or not. You can see a basic Editions Comparison table here.

The most accurate way to detect the edition of SharePoint 2010 installed is by its SKU.

“SKU is the standard abbreviation for “stock-keeping unit.” Microsoft uses SKU as the name for this program to convey the idea of a consulting service package so dialed-down that it can be purchased off a price list.”

The concept was introduced by Rick Devenuti, Microsoft senior vice president for Services & IT in 2005. Since then all Microsoft products have their own SKUs so that we should be able to detect the right editions of them by inspecting the proper Windows Registry Keys. See the article here.

The idea of this post came from the necessity of having a tool to detect the edition of SharePoint 2010 easily in any server by any user user with administrator privileges on the server. After investigating the SKUs for the different editions of SharePoint 2010, I found this article. In there, Microsoft compiled in a code sample the different SKUs available for the different editions of SharePoint 2010.

Those SKUs are:

84902853-59F6-4B20-BC7C-DE4F419FEFAD

Project Server 2010 Trial

ED21638F-97FF-4A65-AD9B-6889B93065E2

Project Server 2010

BC4C1C97-9013-4033-A0DD-9DC9E6D6C887

Search Server 2010 Trial

08460AA2-A176-442C-BDCA-26928704D80B

Search Server 2010

BEED1F75-C398-4447-AEF1-E66E1F0DF91E

SharePoint Foundation 2010

1328E89E-7EC8-4F7E-809E-7E945796E511

Search Server Express 2010

B2C0B444-3914-4ACB-A0B8-7CF50A8F7AA0

SharePoint Server 2010 Standard Trial

3FDFBCC8-B3E4-4482-91FA-122C6432805C

SharePoint Server 2010 Standard

88BED06D-8C6B-4E62-AB01-546D6005FE97

SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Trial

D5595F62-449B-4061-B0B2-0CBAD410BB51

SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise

926E4E17-087B-47D1-8BD7-91A394BC6196

Office Web Applications 2010

Rather than using the Windows Registry to detect the key value, I decided to develop a custom console application to display in a friendly way the current edition installed by using the SPFarm objects. SPFarm objects are the highest-level objects in the SharePoint 2010 hierarchy and, as their name implies, they represent the SharePoint farm.

With this solution, administrators don’t need to remember Windows Registry Keys or commands on Windows PowerShell to detect the version installed on a server; they just need to run this application. It is a simple thing, but it will save me time explaining how to do it.

To create a console application in Visual Studio

1. Add the Microsoft.SharePoint assembly as reference.

2. In Solution Explorer, right-click the console application and click Properties. In the Project property page, select Application and set the target framework to .NET Framework 3.5, and then select Build and set the platform target to x64.

3. Near the top of the file, directly beneath the existing using statements, add the following code:

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration;

4. Add a new static method called “BuildVersions” to return a Hashtable with all SharePoint 2010 editions.

private staticHashtable BuildVersions()
{
   Hashtable editions = new Hashtable();
   editions.Add("BEED1F75-C398-4447-AEF1-E66E1F0DF91E", "SharePoint Foundation 2010");
   editions.Add("1328E89E-7EC8-4F7E-809E-7E945796E511", "Search Server Express 2010");
   editions.Add("B2C0B444-3914-4ACB-A0B8-7CF50A8F7AA0", "SharePoint Server 2010 Standard Trial");
   editions.Add("3FDFBCC8-B3E4-4482-91FA-122C6432805C", "SharePoint Server 2010 Standard");
   editions.Add("88BED06D-8C6B-4E62-AB01-546D6005FE97", "SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Trial");
   editions.Add("D5595F62-449B-4061-B0B2-0CBAD410BB51", "SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise");
   editions.Add("BC4C1C97-9013-4033-A0DD-9DC9E6D6C887", "Search Server 2010 Trial");
   editions.Add("08460AA2-A176-442C-BDCA-26928704D80B", "Search Server 2010");
   editions.Add("84902853-59F6-4B20-BC7C-DE4F419FEFAD", "Project Server 2010 Trial");
   editions.Add("ED21638F-97FF-4A65-AD9B-6889B93065E2", "Project Server 2010");
   editions.Add("926E4E17-087B-47D1-8BD7-91A394BC6196", "Office Web Companions 2010");
   return editions;
}

5. Add a new static method called “GetEdition” to return a human readable edition that matches with the SKU received as a parameter.

public static string GetEdition(string sku)
{
   //Instantiates the hashtable with all editions 
   Hashtable editions = BuildVersions();
   //Returns the right value 
   if (editions.ContainsKey(sku.ToUpper()))
      return editions[sku.ToUpper()].ToString();
   else 
      return "Edition not recognised!!!";
}

6. In the main method, add the code to access the current server farm object by using members of SPFarm.Local. The Product SKUs are located in the Products guid collection of the SPFarm object. If you don’t have the right access to the configuration database, the SPFarm object will never be instantiated and the application will return an error message.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
   SPFarm thisFarm = SPFarm.Local;
   if (thisFarm == null)
   {
      Console.WriteLine("Ooops! you don't have enough permissions to run this application.\nPlease contact your Administrator.");
   }
   else 
   {
      foreach (Guid sku in thisFarm.Products)
      {
         Console.WriteLine(EditionDetector.GetEdition(sku.ToString()));
      }
   }
}

Just for fun I’ve added different colours for errors (red) and SharePoint Editions (green).

Application running

Application running

Notice in the above screen that the farm is displaying two editions: SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 Standard. The reason is the Server edition is installed on top of the Foundation edition..

You must run this application on one of the front-end Web servers. In order to do so, you’ll need to have permissions on the configuration database. Usually the service account and the application pool accounts can read the configuration database.

License: GPL3

About me