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Anne says :
> are meeting tomorrow to discuss SCRUM, some methodology my
> boss found on
> the web (www.controlchaos.com). Has anyone out there used
--------
My company uses something that looks a lot like Scrum, though we don't call
our development cycle by that name. We pulled together cross-functional
teams and hold daily "stand-up" meetings (because they're so short, you
don't need to sit).
The daily meetings are a gold mine for a tech writer in a fairly immature
organization. I am clued in daily about what is being coded, who's working
on what, and what my deliverables are (and when). At each stand-up meeting,
I get an idea about which developers are swamped (stay away from them) and
which ones have time to talk.
We also set short-term "demo" milestones where a feature is to be
demonstrated. These occur every 2 weeks in our dev cycle. This seems to be
part of Scrum -- as something the authors call a "sprint".
As far as getting buy-in from the rest of the team, I found our
"methodology" was easily adopted because everything makes sense. The
developers like the short stand-up meetings as opposed to the alternative:
long meetings that happen less frequently. Cross-functional teams are
popular because developers can design features and the writer can absorb
them -- right then and there.
Good luck!
Regards,
Megan Golding
SecureWorks, Inc.
(mgolding -at- secureworks -dot- net)
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