How far can a Scrum Master go?

This does not refer to the career path of the Scrum Master. I mean, how far can a Scrum Master go without hitting an insurmountable wall, and what happens then?

The article ‘Role of the Manager’ by Pete Deemer on the goodagile.com website offers good insight into how the typical role of a manager, or role of a typical manager changes in Scrum. I have been fortunate enough to experience a lot of the scenarios given in this article. Managers who gracefully retract and step in only when asked to, and managers who just have to give their opinion on every story and every task and every task estimate. Some of this behavior trickles from the top. And in an organization that decides to buy-in into Agile, there is or should be clear communication across all levels about the management’s endorsement of Scrum. But doesn’t practice often turn out to be different from concept?

There surely comes a time when its critical to beat your competition, or go to market with a new feature, like yesterday! This may be a time when even executive management feels they would like to ‘bend’ Scrum a bit, and urge the pigs to cross the finishing line a bit faster?

What should the Scrum Master do in such a situation? Accept the trade-off even if it might mean derailing weeks or months of ‘scrummification’( surely there is no such word in the dictionary)? Take a stand, put his/her foot down and remind management about what they signed on for when they accepted Scrum? Or is it ok as long as the customer says its ok?

How idealistic can a Scrum Master really be? And how far can he go before he needs to bend or break?

Have YOU discovered JIRA yet? What about Greenhopper? Or Bonfire?

Do I sound excited? I am! I may be one of the last few on the face of this earth who had never encountered JIRA before. There is no suspense – for those archaic Clearquest and Quality Center lovers (I am one of them), JIRA is the new kid on the block. Yes, it’s been around since 2004, but that is still new! I know there is a plethora of tools out there, and for every tool I know, there are probably 10 tools I don’t know. Yup! There could be more tools being written right now, almost as we speak. So what is JIRA anyway?

JIRA is developed by this company. Wiki offers information here. It is an issue and project tracking tool that is used by more than 20,000 customers worldwide (website). JIRA offers 10 user licenses for 10$ with proceeds going to charity. JIRA has several plug-ins that offer various great things. Greenhopper is it’s plug-in for Agile project management, Bonfire for testing, Confluence for agile collaboration, Bamboo for continuous integration, Clover for code coverage and so on and so forth. A comprehensive list is available here.

I decided to try exploring JIRA to enhance my knowledge base some. You can try JIRA in 2-3 ways - download a version on your comp, or just login to their online Sandbox, or sign-up for a hosted trial. I decided to download the stuff. The installation was pretty easy and smooth – it installed/configured the web server as well as the database and got full marks from me. I remember painful attempts from several years ago where you needed to install and set up your own web server, licensing server and what not before downloading and using the tool. I had to create a login on the Altassian site and could generate a key easily. I decided to just browse around on my own before following any actual documentation or user guide.

Once you login as an Admin, you have projects, users, issues, plug-ins etc. as tabs. I started off creating a project. I then created some users and assigned them to various groups and added some roles for them. There is a way to assign or revoke permissions for various tasks to a particular group. Issues can be bugs, tasks, improvements or new features etc. Although some terminology is different, it is self explanatory. There are specific workflows or state transition diagrams available. You can either edit these or create your own. I tried to ‘Create an issue’ and it was pretty easy to do it. There are standard priority values like blocker, critical, major, minor etc. You can add your own or you can even change the name of these to suit your style. What’s not to like about so much flexibility?

When you login as a user, you come to your dashboard where you see issues assigned to you. This is configurable and you can setup what you see here. There are two other tabs on the top – Projects and Issues. You can search for issues using any filter, assign them, change the statuses etc. There are also several Reports available showing you information at a glance. Some of them are ‘average age report’, ‘user workload’, ‘worker workload’ etc. An activity feed/stream on the main page shows a trail of your recent activities. There is a lot of rich functionality here and much to explore and discover depending on your needs.

JIRA licenses are free for educational, non-profit and certain other types of users. Licensing costs are much lower than comparable popular tools. But the questions that I would ask as a prospective buyer are – what about complete test management, requirements traceability, scalability, performance, technical support etc.? Only YOU can decide what your specific needs are and whether JIRA meets them, and then the various trade-offs such as cost. But if you are looking for in-depth issue or defect management without too much upfront licensing or training cost, JIRA might be the answer!

I will follow up with more posts about plug-ins such as GreenHopper and Bonfire etc. in subsequent blog posts, making this part 1 of a series. So are you using JIRA for your projects? What has been your experience? Are you happy with its performance, or ready to chuck it out? I eagerly look forward to your feedback.