Saturday, March 10, 2012

Scrum for SharePoint: Article Backlog

A few weeks ago I documented my initial thoughts about Scrum for SharePoint. Much like the scrum process, I am going to create a backlog of article topics ("user stories") and then work through them in priority order. Here is the initial set of article topics. This backlog will be updated with links and changes as the article series progresses.

Comments and suggestions are welcome! I am interested in your questions and feedback from your own experiences with Scrum for SharePoint, as well as comparisons to doing waterfall project management.

Topics in priority order (subject to change): [updated 8-April 2012]

Topic Priority 0: Sprint 0

  • What happens at the beginning, before the development Sprints start?

Topic Priority 1: Product Backlog

  • User stories for SharePoint configuration and customization
  • Breaking up SharePoint functionality into one or more user stories
  • But this is not all custom code? What do we do?
  • Spanning build-out of functionality over multiple sprints
  • Technical Debt: Focus on what must be done now but also track what should be done later and making sure it gets done
    • Ideally there is no Technical Debt, but in reality it is hard to avoid

Topic Priority 2: Sprints

  • What is a sprint?
  • How long should a sprint be for a SharePoint project?
  • What happens within a sprint?
  • How do you effectively incorporate requirements, design, development, and testing within the sprint?
  • When do you consider a feature done?

Topic Priority 3: Team & Process

  • Who is the Scrum Master?
  • Integration between the development, requirements & testing teams and the stakeholders & product owner
  • Development process, deployments for SharePoint configuration vs. customization, continuous integration, and testing (aka Application Lifecycle Management)
  • When do you deploy to production?

Topic Priority 4: Overall Design

  • When does overall SharePoint architecture and design fit into the picture?
  • How to address the overarching technical and graphic design
  • What about infrastructure?

Topic Priority 5: Wrap up

  • Where do we go from here?

Next [Scrum for SharePoint: Sprint 0]