Scrum Stories

Today, I want to write a little bit about how interactive development work is organized at Bonnier Corporation. At university, Business Information and Project Management was one of the classes I liked most, so how things are structured and how you are able to have more transparency at work is something which really fascinates me.

Bonnier Corporation restructured its interactive development project management process for the websites earlier this year using Scrum. Scrum is an agile project management system, which tries to be grounded in human reality and to make the team quicker to react on trends and important issues.

Development work is structured in sprints, iterations of work which are two weeks long. Projects are broken down in small issues in a product backlog. The owner of this product backlog decides which issues need to be prioritized and worked on during sprints. The sprints are of fixed duration—they end on a specific date whether the work has been completed or not and are never extended. So at the end of a two week sprint, the team should be done with the issues that were scheduled to be completed in that sprint.

What I really like about Scrum is that the backlog items are like small stories. Items in the backlog should always include the users' point of view and be valuable to them. Using the template: "As a <user role>, I want <goal> so that <reason>", helps a lot. You then describe the details of this story. This additional information always includes more details about the satisfaction of the needs. 

Many of the major companies in the new media sector—such as Yahoo! or Apple—use agile project management. Both agree that the historic way of developing products doesn't work any more. Instead of sequential development stages, agile project management allows users to react to simultaneous and organic changes.

My slide show for the blog features an animal which is typical for Florida - the manatee. They are amazing animals and seem to be out of this world. The new issue of Sport Diver also has one on its cover. They are huge—their closest relatives are the elephants—and they move very slow. I really hope I will be able to see them in wild nature once.

Slide show: Manatees