Activities

This is a guide of Activities carried out during the development of CEA. This activities are part of our concept of operation under responsibilities of the Scrum Master.

As the project evolves, so do the activities: We try to keep them as lean as possible and expect to adapt this document as needed.

One important aspect of the team is how it is distributed between (mainly) 2 timezones (Singapore, Switzerland) and a large part of the team has other responsibilities (e.g. writing their PhD thesis) that needs to be accounted for and impacts the amount of “ceremony” we can sustain.

The Kanban board

The written record of these activities is reflected in the GitHub issues and are maintained using ZenHub to produce a Kanban view of our process. The columns on our Kanban board are:

  • New Issues

  • Project Backlog

  • Sprint Backlog

  • In Progress

  • In Review

  • Closed

The different events focus on different parts of the process and their respective Kanban columns are mentioned below.

Pre-Planning event

  • Duration: 1 - 2 hours.

  • Frequency: Before each Planning event (bi-weekly)

  • Scope: Prepare the Kanban board to streamline the Planning event.

  • Kanban:

    • Move User stories from “New Issues” to either “Product Backlog” (if in scope) or close them with the label “wont-fix” or “known issue”.

    • Make sure each User story in Product backlog has a (preliminary) time estimation (measured in story points, each story point is roughly 1 day of work)

    • Make sure each User story in Product backlog has a priority label: “Must have” or “Should have”

    • Order the Product backlog with most important issues at the top of the column

NOTE: Currently, the Pre-Planning event is held every second Wednesday at 9am Zurich time on Zoom, the day before the Planning event.

Attendees: Product Owner, Scrum Master

Planning event

  • Duration: 1 - 2 hours.

  • Frequency: After every block of work (sprint, bi-weekly)

  • Scope: Define what User stories should go in the next block of work (sprint). These stories are attached to a new time-bounded milestone.

  • Kanban: User stories are moved from the Product Backlog and to the Sprint Backlog and assigned to a member of the Development team. Each User story requires a time estimate and the developer the issue is assigned to is responsible for updating this estimate based on his/her experience.

Currently, the Planning event is held every second Thursday at 9am Zurich time on Zoom. Subject to change.

Attendees: Scrum Master, Product Owner, Product Sponsor, and Development Team.

Daily stand-up

  • Duration: 15 min.

  • Frequency: daily

  • Scope: Provide early support and mentoring

  • Kanban: Main focus is on User stories in the “In Progress” and “In Review” columns. This is also time to point out important “New Issues” and discuss problems blocking “Sprint Backlog” issues from being moved to “In Progress”.

NOTE: Currently this is being held every morning at 9am (Switzerland time) on Zoom with the SM and a reduced set of the DT.

Attendees: Scrum Master and Development Team.

Roadmap planning and review event

  • Duration: 1 - 2 hours.

  • Frequency: quarterly

  • Scope:

    1. Demonstration of the newest development in the CEA.

    2. Bottlenecks that are faced by the development team.

    3. Planning for the next quarter.

Attendees: Scrum Master, Product Owner, Product Sponsor, and Development Team.

NOTE: While this event is mainly an update to the product sponsors, it is also open to the entire CEA team and the customer team.

Retrospective

  • Duration: 1 hour.

  • Frequency: After every review event

  • Scope: Discuss what was wrong and set next steps to follow.

NOTE: This activity is currently not part of our repertoire. We are trying to figure out the right parameters for this.

Attendees: Scrum Master and Development Team.