Tag Archives: team

24 Common Scrum Pitfalls Summarized

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Scrum is the most popular agile method… if you count all of the teams doing “Scrum Butt”.  Doing Scrum really well is much harder and much rarer.  Here is a list of 24 common pitfalls or bad behaviours of Scrum teams:

  1. Excessive Preparation/Planning: Regular big up-front planning is not necessary with Scrum.  Instead, a team can just get started and use constant feedback in the Sprint Review to adjust it’s plans.  Even the Product Backlog can be created after the first Sprint has started.
  2. Focus On Tools: Many organizations try to find an electronic tool to help them manage the Scrum Process… before they even know how to do Scrum well!  Use manual and paper-based tracking for early Scrum use since it is easiest to get started.  Finding a tool is usually just an obstacle to getting started.  (And besides, check out what the Agile Manifesto says about tools.)
  3. Problem-Solving in the Daily Scrum: The Daily Scrum should not be used to find solutions to problems (obstacles, impediments) raised.  Instead, keep the meeting very short and have those problem-solving conversations afterwards with only those who are interested.  The ScrumMaster facilitates this meeting to keep it on track.
  4. Assigning Tasks: Even though the concept of self-organizing teams has been around for a long time, still some people think that a project manager or team lead should assign tasks to team members.  It is better to wait for someone to step up than to “take over” and assign a task.
  5. Failed Sprint Restart: Although cancelling a Sprint is rare, it can be tempting to try and wait until everything is “perfect” or “ready” before re-starting.  Teams should immediately re-start after cancelling a Sprint.
  6. ScrumMaster As Contributor: The ScrumMaster is like a fire-fighter: it’s okay for them to be idle – just watching the team – waiting for an emergency obstacle.  Taking on tasks tends to distract the ScrumMaster from the job of helping the team follow the rules of Scrum, from the job of vigorously removing obstacles, and from the job of protecting the team from interruptions.
  7. Product Owner Doesn’t Show: The Product Owner is a full member of the team and should be present at all Scrum meetings (Planning, Review and Daily Scrums).  As well, the Product Owner should also be available during work time.  Of course, the PO also needs to work with stakeholders and might be away during that time, but these discussions should be scheduled outside of the team’s meeting times.
  8. Stretch Goals: The team decides on how much work it will do in a Sprint.  No one should bring pressure on the team to over-commit.  This simply builds resentment, distrust and encourages low-quality work.  That said, of course teams can be inspired by challenging overall project or product goals.
  9. Individual Heroics: Individuals on a Scrum team should not do excessive individual overtime, or in any other way try to be the “hero” of the team.  Scrum helps us build great teams of people, not teams of great people (quote from Barry Turner).
  10. Team Organizes Product Backlog: The team does not have proper insight into the needs of users and instead should be focused on solving technical problems.  The Product Owner needs to be accountable for ROI and therefore should resist any pressure from the team to do things in a particular order for “technical” reasons.
  11. Product Owner Specifies Solutions: The Product Owner must allow the team full freedom to come up with solutions to the problems presented in the Product Backlog.  PBIs should be free of technical specifications unless they can be tied directly to a customer or end-user request.
  12. Urgent Interruptions: Urgent interruptions should not be allowed in a Sprint… instead, if it is urgent enough, the team should cancel the Sprint.  Otherwise, the interruption should be put on the Product Backlog and deferred until the start of the next Sprint.
  13. Making Assumptions: Often team members will fail to ask the Product Owner about details of the work they are doing.  A team member solves problems, but it is critical to know about constraints.  The feedback between PO and Team Member should be ongoing throughout every day of the Sprint.
  14. Not Getting Done: This is hard to prevent from happening from time to time, but it can become a habit for a team to over-commit.  Make sure that a team that is doing this is using burndown charts effectively and is holding demos even when they have not completed all their work.
  15. Demo Not Ready: Sometimes a team forgets that it will take time to prepare for a demo: cleaning the team space, setting up a demonstration environment, getting scripts ready, and ensuring that critical stakeholders are prepped.  These activities can be part of the tasks in the Sprint Backlog.
  16. Prototype Not Shippable: A Scrum team should attempt to produce production-quality, “potentially shippable” software right from the very first Sprint.  Building prototype code just delays the inevitable need to write production code.  Similarly, wireframes, detailed designs and other similar tools should also be avoided.
  17. Distributed Team: Although Scrum does not officially require team members to be collocated in a “war room”, the reality is that any distribution of team members (even just into separate cubicles) has a huge negative impact on transparency and communication, which in turn has a huge impact on productivity and quality.
  18. Directive ScrumMaster: The ScrumMaster needs to be a facilitator who supports the team in learning self-organization, and the Scrum rules.  The ScrumMaster should never succumb to the temptation to suggest how a team member does his or her work, nor what task next to work on.
  19. Changing Team Membership: Scrum is a framework for creating high-performance product development teams.  If the membership of a Scrum team changes, it forces that team to re-start the Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing sequence.  If the team is in Norming or Performing, then changing team membership for any reason is a waste of quite an investment.
  20. Non-Scrum Roles on the Scrum Team: It is very common for an organization to create a Scrum team without changing the official title and duties of the people who are members of that team.  For example, a person who is a Project Manager might be given the responsibilities of the Product Owner without an official change of title.  Scrum teams should only have a ScrumMaster, a Product Owner, and Team Members.
  21. Giving Up On Quality: Scrum has very high demands on teams regarding the quality of their results: “potentially shippable software”.  It is easy for a team or organization to fall back on the crutch of defect tracking software instead of maintaining extremely high levels of quality at all times (due to pressure to release features).
  22. Imposed Deadline Scope And Resources: Scrum is reality-based.  If an external stakeholder wants to impose a minimum scope, a deadline and constrain the resources available to the team then they must allow that quality will slip… which in turn is against the principles of Scrum.  The reality is that no-one can predict the future so any such imposition is simply a fantasy.
  23. Definition of “Done” Imposed:  There is confusion between the concept of the definition of “done” and “standards”.  Managers and other stakeholders often incorrectly impose standards on a team as its definition of “done”.
  24. ScrumMaster Not Present: I once saw an organization that had created a room for a “team” of ScrumMasters.  They worked there together most of the time!  The only time the ScrumMaster should be away from the team is when he/she is working on removing an impediment that is outside the team.  Otherwise, the ScrumMaster should be in the team’s room.

Case Study: Agile Process and a Twist on “20 Percent Time” for a Self-Organizing Volunteer Team

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Cross-posted from the personal blog of David D. Parker: A Changemaker in the Making

I am engaged in a learning process with a charity that has undertaken to implement a new model of volunteer coordination based on OpenAgile, an open source agile method.  We recently held an orientation with our new volunteers.  In the hopes that this information will be useful to others who are trying to innovate on their  model of volunteer coordination, here are the instructions I shared with the volunteers.  In summary, they cover our process for sharing tasks, the tools we use to communicate with each other, and our use of what we are calling “60/40 time” a twist on Google’s “20 percent time“.

ORIENTATION INSTRUCTIONS:

I. Agile Volunteer Team Process

We are all here to support the charity. We are inspired by its mission and goals, and we want to help in a way that draws on all of our abilities, knowledge, skills, and creativity.
Our team uses a specific system for producing valuable results. We work in Cycles of 5 weeks. The charity’s staff talk with the stakeholders and decide what steps are necessary for accomplishing the organization’s goals. Each one of these steps, called Value Drivers, add up to providing value for the stakeholders once they’re delivered. The staff also decide the priority order for completing the Value Drivers.
In week 1 of the Cycle, there is a planning meeting with all the volunteers who are committed to doing work during the 5 week Cycle. All volunteers are urged to attend and participate.
  1. The meeting begins with reflecting on the results of the previous Cycle. These observations and lessons are an important part of the planning process.
  2. Next, the team of volunteers works together to create a Cycle Plan by taking the highest priority Value Driver and breaking it down into tasks. Tasks are represented by sticky notes on the wall.
  3. Third, the volunteer team counts the number of tasks needed to complete the highest priority Value Driver. If the past Cycle showed that the team can complete more tasks, then the team takes the next Value Driver in the list and breaks it down into tasks. This process continues until the team makes a unified decision that it has taken on the amount of work it can actually accomplish.
  4. The last part of the meeting is commitment. Everyone shares the responsibility for completing the Value Driver (represented by multiple tasks) by the end of the Cycle of work. Therefore each volunteer must truthfully commit to completing the work. If a volunteer is not comfortable committing to all the work on the task wall, then some tasks must be removed until everyone is able to commit.
In week 2, 3, 4, and 5 of the Cycle, the team of volunteers complete the tasks in the Cycle Plan (aka “doing work”).
  1. Volunteers are free to take whatever task is of interest to them. If they need more information about the task, they ask the other volunteers or the staff for details.
  2. When a volunteer begins a task, they sign their name on the bottom of the sticky and move the task into the “in progress” column.
  3. When a volunteer completes a task, they move the task into the “done” column.
  4. There are weekly conference calls where all the volunteers check in. They answer 4 simple questions
    1. What did I do last week?
    2. What will I do this week?
    3. What did I learn/observe?
    4. What obstacles, if any, are affecting my ability to do work?
  5. New tasks can be added to the wall based on any of the volunteers’ observations, obstacles, clarifications, questions, urgent new tasks, etc. If you add a new task to the wall, add your name to the bottom of the task, so that other volunteers can know who to go to for questions. Note that these new tasks must also be completed by the end of the 5 week Cycle.
At the end of the 5 week Cycle, the team presents the valuable results it has produced to the charity staff/stakeholders. Any insights, observations, corrections, etc. are factored into the next Cycle Plan.

II. Communication Tools

Over the time we have worked together, the volunteer team has decided to use a few tools to help us communicate. The main tool is the task wall and sticky notes. The secondary tool is a shared Gmail account.
NOTE: This list of instructions is a working, evolving document; it is not set in stone. Volunteers are encouraged to work together and adapt the way we do things to create a system that works well for all of us.
ACCOUNT INSTRUCTIONS:
  1. Login and read new messages
  2. Emails in the Inbox means there is work to be done (if the task is complete, archive the email to remove from the Inbox aka the To Do List)
  3. Apply Labels – Gmail doesn’t use folders; it uses labels instead. Apply labels to emails to assist other volunteers with how to treat the content of that message.
  4. Write up volunteer tasks for the task wall (Note: Label as “Task Written & Posted”)
  5. Get work done:
  6. Move the task on the wall to in progress
  7. If the task came from an email, label the task with your name
  8. When the task is complete, label as “Task Complete” and archive the email so it doesn’t appear in the Inbox
CURRENT LABELS:
  • ??? – this means more information or context is required to understand the request –> ASK QUESTIONS, or get help, to complete the task
  • By Volunteer Name –> This means the task/email is in progress; A volunteer labels the email with their name when they accept responsibility for a particular task
  • FYI (For Your Information) – these are emails that contain information that is relevant to volunteers, but does not necessarily require action be taken. If action is required, write up a task and post it on the wall)
  • Task Complete – Use this to label When a task is complete; archive the email so it doesn’t appear in the Inbox
  • Task Written & Posted – apply this label after you write up the task and post it on the wall
  • Social Media – these are emails that apply specifically to social media like Twitter, Facebook, etc.
  • Website – these emails are relevant to website updates

III. What is 60/40 Time?

There are many reasons why people volunteer.  Here is a short list that comes from Molly Schar’s article Making the Most of Nonprofit Volunteers:
  • Belief in the mission of the charity
  • Desire to “give back”
  • Meet new people
  • Make new business contacts
  • Invited or inspired by another volunteer or staff member
  • Improve resume
  • Learn new skills
  • Benefits such as free events
We want all of our volunteers to get the most out of their experience here. Rather than insisting that every moment of a volunteer’s time be spent on completing tasks on the wall, we ask you to split your time 60/40. We want to give our volunteers freedom to spend a large portion of time doing things that satisfy their motivations while still providing value to the organization. For example, if someone has an interest in building skills in using social media, but there aren’t currently any tasks on the wall related to social media, the volunteer would be encouraged to use 40% of their time using social media to benefit the charity. The remaining 60% of the time is essential for delivering other important results to the organization. We aspire to having a trusting environment, so it is up to you to monitor how you’re spending your time. During progress updates, all volunteers are encouraged to share what they’ve accomplished during their 40% time. This will help other volunteers to learn what motivates their teammates and will give the team information that can be integrated into future Cycle Plans.

The Importance of Questions

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I’m currently doing some coaching work with Regina, a new project manager working with a small team of web developers at a community development organization in Toronto.  We had our first session last week. Regina was having trouble getting started on a particular project and I shared with her some of the Agile methods of creating a prioritized Cycle Plan, breaking it down into small tasks, etc.

Regina seems to be finding Agile methods helpful in general, but there was a special kind of interaction that we had around removing an obstacle that was particularly interesting for me.  It had to do with an email she received from Peter, a developer working on one of the websites she’s managing. Regina shared a concern that she didn’t know some of the technical terms Peter was using.  So I had her read through the email and form questions around the points she wasn’t clear about – i.e., “what are buttons?” and I wrote them down as she was speaking.

I then suggested that she compose a reply email containing the same set of questions.  Regina’s eyes opened wide and she exclaimed, “Oh yeah – that’s so obvious!”  I went on to mention that another option would be to go and do some research on her own but that there were some valuable advantages in asking Peter directly, particularly in terms of team-building, that may not be as immediately apparent as asking the questions solely for the purpose of having them answered.  Here are a few:

First, it’s a way forRegina to remind Peter that she does not have a technical background and that he should not assume that she is familiar with web-lingo.  Second, it also reminds him that she is a different person from the last manager he was working with and subtly reinforces that it’s important that they get to know each other as two individual human beings and learn to work together effectively.  Third, and perhaps most importantly, it gives Peter an opportunity to help someone else on the team learn something new, and by doing so, contribute to the culture of learning on the team.  Fourth, and perhaps most obviously, it promotes open lines of clear communication on the team.

(Of course, if the team was colocated, which it is not, lack of communication would be much less of an obstacle!)

Asking questions in the interest of learning makes it visible to others that you don’t know everything.  For some people, this presents a dilemma.  What makes it a dilemma is that asking meaningful questions is something that many people aren’t able to do well.  The ability to ask meaningful questions is a learnable skill requiring the capabilities of truthfulness, humility and courage.  Such capabilities – let’s call them moral capabilities – can themselves be developed through conscious, focused effort.

Someone in the position of a newly hired manager, or a veteran manager with a new team, who lacks these capabilities may feel that it is important to present to a team a persona of all-knowingness.  But, of course, this is false and the truth of one’s degree of knowledge and capability, or lack thereof, soon becomes apparent anyway.  Clearly, this person needs to do some honest hard work to develop some humility, but truthfulness and courage are still often major factors.

Or maybe you’re the kind of person (like Regina) who just doesn’t want to bother anyone.  In this case, humility is not necessarily lacking, but truthfulness – and perhaps most of all courage – may need some attention.  Concepts around moral capabilities deserve much more elaboration, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll leave it at that.

To sum it up, if you are open and clear in the way you ask questions, people will tend to appreciate it and will trust you more in the end.  Moreover, it can have a transformative effect on the environment of the team.  When your team members realize that you are not afraid to ask questions and be truthful about your lack of knowledge in a certain area, it will encourage them to be more truthful about their own capabilities.  Not to mention that most people feel good when they are able to help others.  When your team members feel safe to ask for help and free to help each other, it is empowering for everyone.

Asking meaningful questions, therefore, is an essential aspect of learning together, and nothing is a more powerful contributor to the success of an organization than a team that learns as a team.

What is Agile?

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The word “Agile” refers to a type of method for getting work done.  It’s all about doing valuable work with speed and quality.  An Agile team delivers finished work frequently while working at a sustainable pace.  Agile process consists of short iterations of work that deliver small increments of potentially shippable customer value.  Frequent delivery ensures visibility of the work of the team, as well as its needs and obstacles, to all stakeholders.

Agile refers to a discipline defined as the middle way of excellence between chaos and bureaucracy.  Agile also refers to the philosophy that humans do work in a complex world.

Although Agile has emerged out of endemic crisis in the software development sector (but not exclusive to it!) – mainly caused by the pressure built up from the strata of systemic dishonesty and distrust – it is not a software development process methodology.  Rather, it is a system of learning that challenges deep cultural assumptions and catalyzes change in an organization.

Agile methods are made of processes, principles and tools.  But most importantly they are concerned with people.  Therefore, Truthfulness is the foundation of success in an Agile organization.

Although Agile cannot force people to be truthful, it reveals the direct consequences of opacity in an organization, confronts it and challenges it to change.

Agile prioritizes by value, not “dependency”.  In fact, Agile teams are expected to break dependencies and are empowered by such challenges.  Agile teams self-organize their own work -  they are not “managed resources”.  Agile is team-focused rather than project-focused.  Agile responds to evolving requirements and avoids frozen requirements.  In an Agile environment change is embraced as natural and healthy, rather than as something “risky” to be avoided.

In short, Agile is about overcoming fear, both on the part of individuals as well as collectively and culturally on the part of organizations.

As with any sincere effort to overcome habitual fear, Agile work is hard work.  Becoming Agile can be an uncomfortable, confusing and frustrating process and can remain that way for a long time.

Agile is the art of the possible.  It’s methods are idealistic, not dogmatic.  Agile is about learning, adapting and striving for the ideal.  Agile is based in reality – it relies on everyone to be truthful about the possible and to contribute honestly towards customer value.

Therefore, Agile requires a constructive and positive attitude.  In an Agile environment, a state of crisis is an embraced opportunity to learn and improve.

An Agile team is empowered by its responsibility to self-organize.  On an Agile team, people work together towards a common goal and coordinate their work amongst themselves.  There are no managers or bosses on Agile teams.  Correspondingly, no member of an Agile team reports to a boss or a manager.  All team members report to the team.  While working on a team, everyone checks their institutional titles, roles and responsibilities at the door.  All members of an Agile team are responsible for one thing: contributing as much customer value as possible to the work of the team.

Agile exposes the true character of an organization’s culture and forces visibility on all levels.

At Berteig Consulting, we practice Agile.  I am currently working in the role of Process Facilitator for our core team of 4.  We work in 1-week iterations.  As a couple of the team members have a 4-day work week, we have our Retrospective on Monday mornings at 10 AM, followed by the Planning Meeting for our next iteration at 11 AM.  The remaining work days begin with a daily stand-up meeting using the reporting methods of the Daily Scrum (each member reports 3 things to the team – “What I did yesterday”, What I’m doing today”, and “What are my obstacles”).  We work in a collocated team room, with product backlog items, iteration backlog tasks, obstacles, definition of done and a burn-down chart all up on the walls.  We are currently in our fourth iteration of our current project (which, in this case, is the business itself!).  As part of our retrospectives, team members actually demo finished work – i.e., Mishkin shows us some of the great changes he’s made to his course materials and Paul demos the latest edition of our beautiful newsletter (the one you’re reading right now!).  Laila has even demoed some travel tools that she’s been working on for the coaches and trainers.  We also decided to each write our reflections in order to share them with those who might find it useful as a way of wrapping up the retrospective for this iteration.

Agile can be implemented anywhere people do work together.  Visibility of work, openness of consultation and a strong collaborative spirit feeds an overall feeling of excitement and optimism on an Agile team.  Clear goals based on small pieces of prioritized value and sustainability of work ensure quality and speed of productivity.  But of course, in order for a team to build up these capabilities, it must establish, maintain and defend a firm and immovable foundation of truthfulness.

Crystal Clear – A Book on Small Teams

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I have just started reading Crystal Clear: A Human-Powered Methodology for Small Teams by Alistair Cockburn. I was not too sure what this book would provide for me in the way of relevant learning.

I am intrigued that this work came out of years of experience by Alistair. This quote from the book “Crystal Clear does not aspire to be a “best” methodology; it aspires to be “sufficient,” in order that your team will shape it to itself and then actually use it.” gave me hope. I work on a small team and I wonder about which practices will best suit our situation. I also wonder how our team can use tools and processes then reflect on their usefulness to decide if we will continue their implementation.

I am interested in reading the whole book, but a little concerned that there will be too much techno-words used throughout. I have a background in business, marketing, and the web but not to the degree of the some of the other books that I have read.

What learning have you gained from working on small teams? Have any of you read this book? If so, did you gain any insights that would help my team to develop?

Delivering Successful Agile Projects – A Team Approach

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Last week I gave a talk in Waterloo, Ontario on the topic of Delivering Successful Agile Projects – A Team Approach
.  The slides and a bit more info can be found on the Berteig Consulting site.  There was a great deal of interest so I have also scheduled a public agile project management / certified ScrumMaster course in Waterloo.

The Best Agile Practices to Implement Now (Highest Return on Investment)

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Everywhere I go, there are three practices that make the biggest difference in overall productivity for teams and organizations. All three practices are part of agile methods such as Scrum and Extreme Programming, but you don’t need to be doing these methods to take advantage of these practices. All of them are relatively inexpensive, and the return on investment for these practices is HUGE!!! Without further ado…

1. A Proper Team Room

This is astonishing: you can expect a 60% boost in team productivity from this single practice! The cost of re-stacking your cubes or office spaces is trivial compared to the benefits. If you are going to do this, do it right! Do the research, hire an agile coach or consultant, but make sure it is done well. One organization I worked with was very excited about their new team room setup. They had a nice open-concept layout with lots of windows etc. But they had also made some big mistakes including that all the developers on a single team would have a low wall separating them from each other. Because of poor layout that would block communication paths, their new setup would actually be worse than their old setup! Some research has shown that you can expect as much as a doubling of productivity (reference). This is one practice you don’t want to let your competitors pick up before you do! Here are some tips on agile team room setup.

Example Agile Team Room

2. Short Iterations

Once you have set up your team room, it is critical for your team to have something to do! The fastest way to get your team doing something is to start using short cycles of work (iterations, sprints) to deliver valuable results such as working software. Many software development projects use iterations that are two weeks long or even a month long. I strongly recommend iterations that are only one week long. Again, the benefits are incredible: your team will move through the stages of team development (forming, storming, norming and performing – reference) much more quickly than with longer iterations or no iterations… thus leading to high productivity much sooner. The value here is in the time gained. This chart demonstrates how this works:

short iterations boost team productivity

The short iterations provide a certain type of pressure that forces team and project crisis to happen quickly. However, because iterations deliver working, valuable results, the pressure is not demoralizing, instead it motivates teams to get through the crisis and reach the norming and performing stages of development quickly. Again, to make this work, there are some critical success factors including methods of allowing team commitment, self-organizing and obstacle removal.

3. Test Driven Development

There is a myth that speed and quality are mutually exclusive. This comes from the idea that you need to slow down to make stuff high quality or that you need to sacrifice quality in order to go fast. It is true that initially you might get gains through these approaches. The really amazing thing happens when you try, deliberately and systematically, to do both high speed and high quality work. In software development this is best done through test driven development. In informal polling I’ve done with teams I’ve worked with, test driven development produces a noticeable long-term productivity gain as well as a simultaneous increase in developer and end user satisfaction due to a substantial reduction in defects discovered after the code leaves the developers. I have seen teams doing this that reduce defect rates to 5% (or less!) of what they once were prior to test driven development… while at the same time delivering projects faster than expected. Since substantial expense is squandered on defect management (tools, support teams, user training, lost productivity, etc.) and since staff turnover is also high in IT and high-tech, the results of test driven development on the bottom line are substantial.

Benefit of All Three Practices

If a team and an organization adopt these practices, get through the initial cost of learning them, then I would like to suggest that your teams can easily double their productivity if not more. For a team of 5 people working on a 100 day project this amounts to shortening the project to 50 days (save $200,000) or get twice as much work done. Clearly, an organization that adopted these practices and perfected them would save huge amounts of money and would be able to crush any competitors not doing this.

Previously I wrote a more general treatment of the benefits of agile and an article that lists other resources discussing the benefits of agile.

Any discussion of benefits should at least say a few words about how exactly to measure those benefits! However, I’m out of time. How do you measure the benefits of agile?

Hey folks, if you found this useful, could you please “Digg” and “Reddit” this article?  Thanks!

Not getting the benefits of agile? Consider the Agile Clinic!

Three Ways of Expanding the Scrum Definition of “Done”

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The Definition of “Done” is an important concept that helps us understand how to produce working, potentially shippable software at the end of every Sprint. Previously, I wrote about how to expand the definition of “done” from the perspective of the team’s skills, capabilities and work processes. This time around, let’s look at it from a more tactical perspective: how do we identify things that should be added to the definition of “done” and when do we do this?

Identify Repeating Tasks

Early on, the team will make tasks that include every activity that is done to make software out of the features listed in the Product Backlog.  This will include all sorts of things including “Build login web service”, “Write unit tests”, “Review code”, etc.  Most of these tasks will be thought of in terms of who will be doing them so that throughout the Sprint every person on the team is busy with tasks and there is very little passing of a single task from one person to another.  In other words, one task = one person.

It will quickly become clear that there are a number of similar or identical tasks that show up for most items in the Product Backlog.  If you have to develop a user-visible feature or function in the software, you always need to check code into your version control system, you always need to do some sort of testing on the code, etc.  So you might have tasks in the Sprint Backlog called “Internationalize login panel”, “Internationalize registration panel”, “Internationalize login error panel”, and so on.  Every Product Backlog Item has an “Internationalize ….” task.  These tasks can be abstracted and the “Internationalize” idea becomes part of the Definition of Done (DoD).  It applies for every Product Backlog Item.

You might also have common pairs of tasks where one of the pair is unique to what is being built, and another is attached to it, but common across many pieces of the system.  For example, you might have a task “AnonymousUser class” and an associated “Unit test AnonymousUser class”.  Then you might have another task “LoginErrorHandler class” and an associated task “Unit test LoginErrorHandler class”.  Again, the idea of unit testing then can be identified as part of the DoD.  These apply to every Sprint Backlog Task.

Once these required activities or constraints are added to the DoD, you can then stop identifying them as separate tasks.  Instead, they get represented in some other way in your work environment: a checklist on a whiteboard, columns in a spreadsheet, or checkboxes pre-printed on the cards you use to write Tasks or Product Backlog Items.

Prepare for Release

The software might need many things done to it or around it to prepare for a release.  Often, these things will be put on the Product Backlog  as non-functional business requirements.  For example, it may be important to write online help for the system and this is not currently being done by the team.  The Product Owner identifies that users will need this help and puts it on the Product Backlog.  Yo(1) discovers that These things can eventually be moved into the DoD.  For example, yo puts “Online Help” in the Product Backlog and prioritizes it somewhere near to the point in the Product Backlog when the system will be ready for a release.  The team eventually gets to this item and does it during a Sprint.  At this point, the system is “caught up”, but in order to prepare for the next release, the Product Owner will have to put the same “Online Help” item on the Product Backlog again.  Instead of doing this, it can be added to the DoD.

It is critical that the team agree to add these things to the DoD, and not be forced by someone.  If the team does not feel that it is within their capacity to include something in the DoD, the ScrumMaster should find ways to assist with this: training, etc.  Once something is added to the DoD, it must be completed every Sprint in order to have a successful Sprint.

Release/Deploy to Users

There is nothing like actually getting software into the hands of users to find out what “done” really means!  Similarly to preparing for a release by adding things to the Product Backlog, the team may have a “release sprint” or a “stabilization sprint”.  Everything that is done in one of these special Sprints could and probably should be added to the DoD sooner rather than later!  Again, the team must agree to doing this expansion of the DoD and be supported by the organization so that they have the capacity to meet the DoD every Sprint.