Over the past years, we have been using the scrum agile methodology in the openmrs development process. With the introduction of kanban, i have noticed that:
Very few community members have been attending the daily scrum meeting.
The sprints are managed by the squads.
Now, just before i officially handover to the next scrum manager, kindly advise on the following.
What is the essence of daily scrum?
Why should we encourage community members to join daily scrum meetings?
What is the way forward for this platform?
Your contribution to this will be highly appreciated.
Great question Grace. FWIW, we actually have had Kanban-styled boards for a while (e.g. the documentation team’s Trello board was technically a Kanban board) but it’s a very fair point that as squads have increasingly managed their own issues and sprints, the role of the scrum can seem less clear.
There are some notable areas though that don’t have a clear squad or team or regular sprint process, and that’s the 2.x RefApp, the Help Desk, and Infra issues. So before I can answer your questions, it would help to know: Are the people who are using Scrum finding it helpful? Or not?
Personally: What I find especially helpful is, I monitor our Jira activity through #jira-feed, and all our github commits in #github-rss-feed, and these feeds actually give me a much clearer, accurate picture of who is actually contributing what. (Especially the github commits.) But they don’t necessarily help people talk through their blockers. So: are scrum contributors finding that the regular scrum is helpful to get unblocked, or feel a sense of fellowship? That sounds valuable to me.
When I skim the scrum messages, it does give me a general sense of who’s doing roughly what when I see folks mentioning things like the following:
Did help desk tasks
Working on issue XYZ-123
Attending [interesting event]
Blocked: No / Yes - [details]
(In contrast, I don’t find it helpful to see “Slack and Talk” written in the scrum; that doesn’t tell me what the person is working on or looking for or interested in. Something like “Learning about our CSRF work” would be more helpful.)
Though TBH I find the jira and github feeds more helpful to me personally.