{"id":203,"date":"2015-05-17T18:07:42","date_gmt":"2015-05-17T16:07:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/proessler.wordpress.com\/?p=203"},"modified":"2022-12-14T11:32:55","modified_gmt":"2022-12-14T10:32:55","slug":"using-scrum-on-our-trip-to-barcelona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/using-scrum-on-our-trip-to-barcelona\/","title":{"rendered":"Using Scrum on our Trip to Barcelona"},"content":{"rendered":"

My partner Mel and me went on a short trip to Barcelona. We created a backlog with things to do, used backlog refinement and 1-day sprints to manage ourselves in the 3,5 days there. The following post describes our experiences.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Backlog
Backlog and Sprint Board at our hotel room<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A backlog for the trip?<\/strong>
\nSimilar to an Agile software development project you normally want to get the best possible ROI (Return of Invest) from your holiday. The holiday ROI, of course, is different for everyone and not neccessarily connected to a monetary value.
\nSimilar to a lot of projects out trip had a fixed time (in our case 3,5 days).<\/p>\n

Mel and me have never been to Barcelona before, so we populated our backlog with sightseeing tips and places to eat from a city guide book as well as asking family and friends who have been in Barcelona before. (Asking my Facebook friends resulted in at least 15 Backlog items…\\o\/) And that was already the first version of the backlog! A very rough list with items on Post-Its like “Stroll through Barri Gotic”, “Eat Churros” or “Familia Sagrada”, but good enough to start our trip.
\nI experienced a lot of Agile projects that started the same way: An appropriately detailed list of user stories with no guarantee of completeness or sufficiency. That’s why we want the backlog to be emergent. For Mel and me this provided the best flexible way to travel and also the chance for serendipity.<\/p>\n

\"Setting
Setting up first backlog<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Some of the backlog items were described with more details, information or restraints (our “acceptance criterias”) like “Get tickets online to avoid queues.” or the adress of the restaurant; mostly as a result of talking with each othet or reading the city guide. We also used diffferent Post-It colors for different types (sight, eating place, transport, …).<\/p>\n

The first prioritization of the backlog and Sprint Planning was done at the hotel bar after we arrived late night in Barcelona.
\nOur Scrum Flow in a way then was then every night: Review (“What did we do today?”, “What was your highlight?”), Retrospective (“What can we do different tomorrow to have an even more awesome trip?”), Planning (“What do we want to do tomorrow.”). Backlog Refinement took place almost all the time, either because we read new stuff or liked places we wanted to re-visit (definitely El Born, “Looks like a nice restaurant\/bar.”) or recognized we will not have enough time to do it and therefore threw away the Post-It.<\/p>\n

Stakeholder, Product Owner, Scrum Master, Dev-Team<\/strong>
\nIn a way the Scrum roles were implicitly realized:
\nMel acted more like the Product Owner because she read the city guide more seriously than I did. Therefore she had better arguments on he ROI. I was more the Scrum Master because I pointed out several times that we can’t do all of the sights or made clear the consequences.
\nThe Dev-Team was the people and the city of Barcelona. At least in a way: They not only offered us a wide range of possibilities on how to maximize our ROI but also “delivered” awesome sights. \ud83d\ude42
\nStakeholders or users were Mel and me ourselves, but also our family and friends (“Have you visited the place I told you to?”) or our employer (“Have fun and relax to be happy back at work.”).
\n[OK. The role comparison is a bit lame.]<\/p>\n

Lessons learned<\/strong>
\nMel an me had a great time in Barcelona. It was the first time that we organized the things we want to do with a backlog, but both of us really loved it. Every evening we were happy and sometimes astonished how many sights we visited (moving Post-Its in “Done”). We gained very clear insights that we can never see all sights within those 3,5 days and felt OK with that.
\nWe also understood that we should do a little more planning next time to avoid standing in front of a closed museum (although it was mentioned in the city guide… :)).<\/p>\n

Molt de gust y fins ara!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Similar to an Agile software development project you normally want to get the best possible ROI (Return of Invest) from your holiday. We tried to use Scrum on our short trip to Barcelona. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[19,20,45,68],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scrum","tag-backlog","tag-barcelona","tag-it-agile-blog-planet","tag-scrum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":324,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions\/324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterroessler.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}