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I am working in 2 scrums as a developer, and it is difficult get anything done - I wanted to ask if other people have had the same issue and what did they do to manage their work?

It does not seem an agile way to work at all.

junwin
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  • If you can please post something more detailed. I.e where are you facing the biggest problem. – acostela Sep 01 '15 at 13:24
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    For me the biggest issue is answering the question about what I expect to do in each scrum meeting, what tends to happen for all but the most trivial task is nothing gets done. – junwin Sep 01 '15 at 13:38
  • There are three of us in the same position. – junwin Sep 01 '15 at 13:39
  • In my experience we have the whole team a fast meeting 10 minutes every morning before working. In that meeting each one say what they did the day before and what we are going to do next day. Tasks are planned in different sprints every 2 weeks. So everyone know what they are going to do. I don't know where are you facing problems? – acostela Sep 01 '15 at 13:45
  • The problem we have is there are two distinct scrums, i.e. 2 daily standups. – junwin Sep 01 '15 at 15:07
  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it belongs on Programmers.SE or Project Management SE. – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine Jul 09 '17 at 05:06

4 Answers4

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The problem is one of commitment. As a team you commit to your peers at the sprint planning meeting and each daily scrum what you will all accomplish together. If you have another team, that undermines that commitment naturally, it also inflates your WIP and causes task switching and the additional overhead of the ceremonies for two teams.

Why are you on both teams? The usual answers are: domain knowledge, skill set, because we only have one QA (insert any discipline there), funding/allocation, etc.

I fundamentally believe that your team will not have a reliable, predictable team until you form your teams in a way that you can commit to your team mates.

Tim Wise
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  • Thanks for that, I had not thought about the affect on WIP, but that's certainly much more. There are 3 devs in this position, we regularly share QA. – junwin Sep 01 '15 at 14:46
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Report your situation as an impediment to the scrum master(s) and commit yourself only to the work you think you can achieve until this impediment is solved (by the scrum master(s)). It is not a contest on who commits to the most work done and then not achieving it.

Lars Gendner
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  • We (there are more than one of in this position) have tried that with no effect we still get pushed to commit on tasks on both scrums. I have asked that they let us finish one of the projects - then switch to the other with no luck either. – junwin Sep 22 '15 at 21:54
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    If you have no support from above, this will never work. Pushing someone to commit him/herself unrealistic is definitely not scrum. Escalate further to higher management levels. If you are getting pushed by the top of the food chain, suggest to abandon scrum since they don't understand its mechanisms. – Lars Gendner Sep 23 '15 at 07:44
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I rather think this is a discipline issue. If you are following you need have scrum disciplines. What happens is when you are a shared resource, there will be switching cost and productivity loss. If you still want to follow this, you need to take actions to reduce switching cost and increase productivity.

One thing that you can defined dates where you are going to work on. Ex: first three days you are in one project and next two days your are in other project. If you define like that, then you can plan work to increase productivity and reduce switching cost.

Another thing is that reduce the participation time on stand ups and sprint planning. Make sure to prioritize your areas and discuss and then you leave those ceremonies than staying for the entire meeting. this is a responsibility of the scrum master to plan.

Janith Gunasekara
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Working in multiple teams is possible, but each team needs to be considerate and accept they are only going to get 50% (or just under) of your time.

When planning, don't over commit, look at how many story points you can roughly achieve in a sprint and only commit to 50% of that total for each team.

Try splitting your time into Team A's work in the morning and Team B's in the afternoon. Each team will then know when you are available to them and should try (unless urgent) not to disturb you when you are not doing their work.

Have dedicated times for planning, standups and try to get the team to stick to these so you are not double booked.

The scrum master (or any elected person) for each team could also consider having a scrum of scrums where they get together and quickly discuss how things are going in the same way as a normal scrum so that they understand what pressures you are under.

However you mange this, you will get less actual work done than being in one team due to the commitments such as planning, standups, retrospectives which agile introduces.

Scott
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