Jerome Hill

Jerome Hill was involved in initial training of Agile and Scrum almost 5 years ago.  I attended and Agile Boot Camp course with a few other managers and we started implementing the Scrum process slowly the first year and were using a manual scrum board for our daily meetings and bi-weekly sprint meetings.

As our team grew the past 3 years, I was instrumental in helping train new folks on the Scrum process.  I attendded a Certifed Scrum Master course and with that education I worked closely with the Product Owner to organize and groom the backlog.   My Business Analyst was heavily involved in expanding the user stories requirement and acceptance criteria.  It took us about a year to fine tune our user story writing to ensure it met the needs of our development team.

IT managers and Product Owner were involved in a bi-weekly Backlog Grooming meeting and the entire team was involved in our Story Pointing sessions, Sprint Planning sessions, Daily Standups and our Retrospectives in our 2 week Sprint cadence.

We changed our estimation for User Stories about a year ago from absolute to relative.  We initially were story pointing using the numbers as number of days.  We felt the team was not estimating correctly so I analyzed all of our story pointing over a 3 month period and looked at the number of task and bug hours estimated versus actual completed work for each user story to get an idea of which User Stories the development and QA team were within a 20% efficiency of completed work based on the original estimates.  We then changed our story pointing method to relative sizing and prior to each story pointing session we reviewed these successful user stories to help the team gauge the relative size for new stories.   Previously our story pointing sessions would take hours to get through requirement reviews, discussion and then back and forth with the absolute estimates.  Once we switched we were just holding a story point review session for an hour and then held a separate 15 minute meeting to estimate those stories saving the development team hours each sprint.

We utilized TFS (Team Foundation Service) for our Agile and Scrum boards and planning tools.