So there I was, slogging away on some .NET code at a largish enterprise that was “really into Agile, we’ve been doing Scrum for like three years now!” We were a week into the current three-week sprint.

At that morning’s standup, we’d gone around the table as usual. Jon said he was taking the refactoring story on the WCF middle tier. Ellen, who I think was Scrum Master of some other team, assigned me the task of resolving an exception that was being thrown by client-side code. Jeff said he couldn’t package the database changes because there simply wasn’t anywhere to check them into TFS (version control). I had code checked out, modified, and working to implement a feature in an upcoming release; but I was holding off on checking it back in because, per the team lead’s policy, we can’t have more than one branch “because people keep doing it wrong.”

That afternoon, the team lead’s boss came around and called a quick meeting.

Phase I, he said, was running late and he wanted to know why. And furthermore, when was Phase II of the project going to get done?

Ellen said she had all our burn-downs and they checked out, as everyone had burned down approximately forty hours. She had also added up all the estimates for the stories that were going into Phase II, and they came out to 990 hours, and since we had six team members Phase II should be done in four weeks. In fact, she said, we could put all of Phase II into the next sprint, which would give us just one week of carry-over.

Okay, that’s good, said the boss–but when can we start testing the current release, the Phase I release?

That’s when the team lead told everyone we don’t really have a deploy script for the test server, and there’s not really a production server at all. It can take IT a while to provision the new production server, he went on, but in the meantime we can host the production system on a spare Windows 2003 server. Jeff pointed out that Windows 2003 won’t run .NET 4.5 applications, so we’d have to retool the application to .NET 4.0. He agreed, though, that it wasn’t worth doing until after QA finished testing the current code.

But there were still a few tasks left before testing.

The boss thought my priorities in particular were off. “Look,” he said, “you can’t possibly need to have the API to FedEx done before the Data Access Layer.” I tried to tell him I wanted to hit the FedEx API first because it was a higher risk and thus would benefit from the greatest possible lead time, but the team lead cut me off, saying it was a low priority and wasn’t going to be in the current release anyway. (I later quietly asked, “Why was it in this sprint if it’s a low priority?” The answer: “We had to allocate all your hours and that was the only thing that would fit.”)

The boss whipped out his “to-do list” for the Phase I release. The FedEx thing wasn’t on it.

I was excused from finishing the API to FedEx, because another team needed that Data Access Layer done as early as possible in the sprint. It wasn’t on the to-do list either.

Our sprint ended successfully!

A couple weeks later, my feature in the upcoming release was still not checked in, but since my code was more or less done we figured it had to count. That WCF middle tier compiled and seemed to run okay, but the refactoring broke several unit tests that hadn’t been fixed yet. We added “Fix or comment out failing unit tests in WCF” to the sprint after the next one so we could get Phase II in first. The exception I’d gotten from Ellen took a couple of days to fix, because it had something to do with the Razor version we were using and I don’t know that much about Razor. Finally, Jeff’s database changes were handed over to a special meeting of the SQL Developers team, which was eventually going to build a schema repository.

As for rolling out Phase I, well, we had to add a story that simply read “Backfill to .NET 4.0.” The boss said that should only take a day so we assigned it three points. (Each developer was expected to do about twenty points per week, so that seemed about right.) Our scrum master said he’d take care of the test deploy script so it wasn’t necessary to add to the actual sprint. And we added a story (which just said “test”) for the QA department to do. We assigned it one to eight points, depending. And we’re not sure when that backup Windows 2003 server is coming through, but we created a story (“migrate to 2003 server”) for me to do. I don’t have production access but I can probably get an IT person to work with me on it.

You know what?

The great thing about working in a Scrum shop is that everyone’s super flexible and does the best they can without relying on management to tell them what to do all the time. It’s so empowering!