Agile2012

Sure, working with a fully cross-functional team where all member's time is 100% on the project is ideal, but we must deliver in the real world of specialization and matrixed personnel. In this presentation I will describe a methodology that we have developed that allows our Scrum team to consistently predict our capacity and deliver what we promise sprint after sprint, even though our developer's time is fragmented and specialization is to the point where team members have Ph.Ds in various needed disciplines. The key to this system is to, before each planning meeting, even though it appears blasphemes at first glance: * Map individual team member's capacity to story points. * Estimating the potential sprint backlog's user stories in story points. * Map developers to user stories. The reason this approach works, even though it appears to go against the lean principle of self-empowered teams, as well as many others, is a simple phrase we use over and over, "A starting point for negotiations." I am Scrum Master for a development team at Sandia National Laboratories, one of the three national nuclear weapons Laboratories operated by the United States Government. Our development team provides computer programs written in C++ that use numerical simulation of physical phenomena (i.e. they solve the mathematical equations that govern natural occurrences such as heat conduction, air flow, and fires) to model the physical environment encountered by nuclear weapon delivery systems. Our charter is to provide tools which allow designers to deliver safe and functional systems to the nation's stockpile. Our development team is made up almost entirely of engineer's with Ph.Ds in various disciplines such as Aerospace, Chemical and Mechanical Engineering as well as Physics and Mathematics. The outline of the presentation is as follows: * Introduction * A description of our business space. * A description of our development team's educational background, time demands, how they measure success, how their success is measured. * Our methodology, including our reliance on the the philosophy of "A starting point for negotiations." * A critical look at our methodology. * Criteria for success. * The tools we use. * Metrics demonstrating success. * Concluding Remarks