See the Poppendieck's book on "Lean Software Development" for the
principle of deferring commitment to decisions. If there's no reason
to commit my name to a specific task today then defer that commitment
until a more appropriate time (such as when I'm about to start the
task, at which time I'll also know much more about how we stand on
the other tasks and whether I'm still really the right person for
that task).

Regards,
Mike Cohn
Author:
Agile Estimating and Planning
User Stories Applied
www.mountaingoatsoftware.com


On Jan 27, 2006, at 8:26 AM, Steve Berczuk wrote:

> Hmm,
> I got the impression (from my recently completed CSM class and other
> sources) that signing up for a task or two as you go /was/ the "Scrum
> way."
>
> Did I misunderstand? With the team I'm on is starting a new Sprint in
> a week I'm planning to encourage us to do the 'task at a time'
> approach. (which, granted, does confuse those who like more
> traditional project mgmt approaches)
>
> Steve
>
> On 1/27/06, mpkirby@... <mpkirby@...> wrote:
>
>> A few weeks ago craig larman sent out a post regarding how to
>> divide work up
>> among the scrum:
>
>> On 19 Dec 2005 at 0:26, Craig Larman wrote:
>>
>>
>>> In classic scrum sprint planning, members sign up for all or most of
>>> the tasks. I've seen this lead to several problems, and is another
>>> big-batch step. I recommend the following, which works well, is the
>>> smallest-batch lean-thinking approach, and reduces the problems with
>>> big-sign-up and over-specialization:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 1. members volunteer for _1_ task (e.g., by writing on a spreadsheet
>>> printout hanging on the wall of the sprint backlog)
>>>
>>>
>>> 2. when finished a task, repeat step 1
>>
>>
>> I'm wondering if you want to incorporate that advise? We tried it
>> the other
>> way, and found it to be somewhat "un-scrumlike" in that we had
>> difficulty
>> getting visibility into who was doing what after it got assigned.
>> So when
>> we got in trouble, backlog stories (sprint backlog tasks) would
>> inneficiently sit in a person's queue, while others didn't have
>> work to do.
>
> --
> Steve Berczuk | steve@... | http://www.berczuk.com
> SCM Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration
> www.scmpatterns.com
>
>
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