Make it Visible, Make it Big: Sprint Burndown

An important tenant of Scrum is transparency.  Keeping the teams metrics and state of the project visible to others not only enables others to make decision based on this information, but it also has a great psycological effect on the Team.

Where is your team's sprint burndown chart?
A good place to put the sprint burndown chart is in an are where it gets a lot of visibility, but also where important people see it.  The burndown chart can be placed in a Starbucks, but the Starbucks clientèle is not interested in this.  I have placed the burndown chart on the Director of Engineering's office door, or on the door of the Product Owner.  Another effective place to put the chart is in a room or hallway where the peers of the delivery team can see it.  Of course, you want the delivery team to see the chart all the time too.

Make it BIG
People tend to respond to things larger in scale, than small things.  For example, the worlds largest thermometer gets a lot of attention just because it is big.  Nothing special about saying it is 86 degrees, but if you say it in a big way, now you have some attention.

Printing the chart on 8.5" x 11" paper isn't going to cut it.  Draw a chart on a large easel pad (24" x 37") or if you have a HP Designjet T610 with a 44" spool of paper, now that will work.  Add some colors and make the chart easy to read.

Scrum Tools: Points in eScrum and TFS in Visual Studio

I have been using the eScrum project template in Microsoft Visual Studio TFS edition for a few sprints now.  Along the way, the team noticed some issues with the template.  In TFS, by navigating to Team > Process Editor > Work Item Types > Open WIT from Server, I opened the eScrum Product Backlog Item template and made some changes.

Points
The Product Backlog Item template is missing a "points" field to indicate the relative size of a PBI.  There is a Baseline Work field, but that is used to represent the number of hours for the PBI in reports. I decided to add a Points field where a dropdown shows Fibonacci based numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, 250, 500, ?, infinity).  Since there are values such as "?" and "infinity, the field type must be 'String'.  I could have used the Baseline Work field, but that allows people to enter values that could complicate things, such as entering 21 instead of 20.  To avoid the debate, or having to correct this, I added an ALLOWEDVALUES rule to control this.

Query
Now I can create a query to allow me to see what items does the team need to estimate.  By using the team's velocity, this query can include items that are larger than half a sprint, which indicates the team needs to work with the Product Owner to break this down into smaller PBIs.

Quote: Communication

"Can I talk to the guy who is telling you what to tell me?"
Dan C.