Project Planning and Scrum

 One of the major drawback of the Scrum Method is that it overlooks the fact that many changes have to be done in a longer period of time and those big project has to be managed in a different lifecycle across multiple sprints.

Here are some possible ways:

Notes and Tips about Jira

New product or project development:

1. Create a new JIRA project

You need to have the project administration permission to do so.
In an organization, this permission will not be granted to many people.

You can give it a key.  The key will be prefix of issues number for issues created in the project.
You can give it a unique icon, call Avatar.

A JIRA project is sometime mapped to "Product" within software organizations.  A new product may be a "project", but when you have multiple releases and start maintenance cycles, you are developing and maintaining a product which is typically created as a JIRA project.

2. Create a Board

For a new development project, a new broad can be created for an existing JIRA project, or for a JQL, which is a query for collecting issues from multiple projects.

This is a very good way to run an "integration" project, when a project involves the teams that are from multiple product and from multiple organizations.

You can create multiple boards.  Multiple boards can exist simultaneously.  A board is actually just a view of the issues in different columns.

Pickup a ticket from the backup

It is nice that a developer to pick up a prioritized ticket from JIRA without anyone assigning the ticket to him or her.

However, we also need to think about impacts of this approach.

Team Work and Lan Yu Chong Shu

Here is a Chinese Story about 濫竽充數 ( Lan Yu Chong Shu):

During the warring states period (475 – 221B.C.) in ancient China, the King of the state of Qi was very fond of listening to music played on Yu, a wind instrument made of bamboo and wood.   The King convened musicians from all the states and formed a large royal band with 300 musicians.  When he wanted to listen to
the music, he would call in the whole band to play Yu together.  The ensemble was spectacular and the sound was thunderous to ears, but the King seemed to quite enjoy the effect, so he kept this habit all the time.

How to describe User Requirements

Persona

User Stories

User Scenarios

Use Planning Poker for release planning

Let people to contribute and resolve the disagreement and reach a consensus.

A good Youtube video

Release Management

Release Planning

A list of features should be scheduled as part of the planning process.  In scrum method, each sprint is a release.  The release planning is handled as the sprint planning.
The features or fixes are prioritized.  They are documented as backlogs in the scrum system.

Release Notification

A list of customers may be waiting for a fix or a feature for a given release.  You will need to notify the customers that a release is available.

Documentation

The release note should mention what fixes and features are available.
The release note should be searchable.  A customer should be able to know what is the minimum required version for getting a specific fix or a feature.

Release Tracking on the Customer Site

For a given instance, you should be able to know the update history.  What is the version of the installation and what patches were applied.

It is particularly useful for the hosted environment.  The hosted customers should be able to submit the change requests.  Once the change is applied, the change history should be kept.  The change requests become the orders for DevOps.

When your software is solid, few customers may need or want to take an update.  The frequency can vary depending on the status of the product.

Handling bugs in scrum process

This is an interesting topic about how to manage and prioritize the maintenance efforts in the scrum process.

Minimum viable product

This is an important concept for startup and for a new project.

However, it is hard to define it.

Daily Standup

I attended my first standup meeting in my new company.

Defining the Scope

Defining the scope is about defining what you are going to do.

"Knowing what you need to do" is different from "defining what you are going to do".

When defining what you are going to do, you are considering your constraints, such as resource availability and time.