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Submitted by tom.evans on
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I was wondering if any listeners use the project management discipline called “Scrum” (For those who do not know what Scrum is, it is a simple form of agile software development featuring month-long development cycles). When I heard about “hot wash” in the members podcast, I immediately thought of the part of Scrum called the “retrospective meeting”. At the end of each development cycle, we do brainstorm-syle meeting to talk about what works and what doesn’t in our project. I like the format and guidelines Mark gave for doing the hot wash, and I think it will improve our Scrum process when we do our monthly retrospective meetings.

I would love to hear from other “ScrumMasters” out there, and if they are applying hot wash, www/tala, or any other manager tools techniques to their Scrum process.

-Tom

PierG's picture

Tom,
I'm more used to eXtreme Programming but I know SCRUM as I'm interested in all kind of agile methods.

I agree with you AND I think that the very practicle, easy but rigorous ways in wich Mark and Mike are providing us tools fits very well with the agile communities.

PierG

fzawadiak's picture
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I'm not an "official" ScrumMaster, but I really like this methodology. Well, I generally like agile methodologies. It's kind to hard to use them in company used to "engineering" methodologies - no tools available, people are slightly afraid etc.

I hope to make them slightly more popular, and acceptable by customers . Already we suceeded in persuading customer to try agile approach in engagement - notally Scrum, but I use lot's of it's ideas. :-)

harnod's picture
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Hi,

we are a team o 6 developers & testers applying Scrum to our development.

We are doing hot wash in our sprint review sessions. To highlight some points, the first ones, done locally with the use of flipchart paper, worked really well. After a few sprints, a colleague from a different continent was added to the team and we had to change a lot of our practices.

We have recently done sprint reviews over skype, with the whole team on and my desktop being broadcast to the team members. I know that use of computers has been discouraged, however, this is the best I could think of. For the actual notetaking we are using a spreadsheet where I fill in two columns, but unevenly. There are never two entries (= for both WWW and TALA) on a single line, sometimes, I leave an extra space. This helps for the visual connections that Mark talks about.

The practice described above works less effectively than the "paper" method, but is still good enough for us.

The only thing I am really struggling with is the level of involvement from team members who do not  feel comfortable speaking  English  (our team's Lingua Franca). This, however, is a problem not limited to our sprint reviews :-)

Hope this helps you even years after the original post :-)

 

Matej