Session 7 Team Assignment.

For this assignment, your goal will be to expedite value creation by striving for a Minimum Marketable Product (MMP) soon, and then adding and refining requirements as you go and as more insights and information become available. These "requirements" will be captured as features, epics, or requirements (you can pick your favorite!) in the product backlog which will be prioritized and refined (into user stories and tasks) over time. If you work among yourselves as an effective team, you can simplify your task allocation so each person's assignment tasks are clear and simple and link cleanly with each other. So, spend some time at the beginning planning well for how you will split the pieces of this team assignment efficiently and effectively. For starting a podcast project, you will develop the product backlog and define sprints and sprint backlogs:

a. Construct a prioritized product backlog consisting of features, epics or high-level requirements. Simple sentences are adequate. Consider customer satisfaction, value, risks, implementation cost, high-level dependencies, etc. while prioritizing. No need to be too scientific about this. A roughly right approach works! A brief paragraph justifying the prioritization is adequate. Use the first tab in the Product and Sprint Backlog MS EXCEL template under Team Projects in the Virtual Labs and Team Projects tab under Content.

b. Decide on a reasonable number of sprints and have two concurrent sprint streams (being worked on by different development teams, but the same Scrum Master and Product Owner). For convenience, assume that all sprints are four weeks long and that the two sprint streams start at the same time. For example, you could have six sprints altogether in two parallel streams of three each. Before the start of your first sprint (in each stream), you will want to make sure that the highest priority entries in the product backlog (some of which will obviously be candidates for your first sprint) are sufficiently granularized - for example into user stories - and that they have assigned story point estimates (total as well as for each user story). Follow the user story format in the Session 6 narrative, for example.

c. Assign story points to each of the user stories. Remember from the narrative that story points are a rough proxy for the effort (or resources or cost) associated with each user story. Story points are relative values, so 4 story points represent about twice the effort of 2 story points. You may use Fibonacci story point estimates (see the Session 6 narrative) if you wish, but are not required to. Use the tabs in the Product and Sprint Backlog MS EXCEL template under Team Projects in the Virtual Labs and Team Projects tab under Content,with one tab for each sprint. There are two streams of three sprints each in the MS EXCEL template, but you may add more if needed (just copy a tab and appropriately edit it).

d. Transfer a few of the high-priority product backlog items to a sprint backlog (for your first sprint/iteration). (Scrum uses the term sprint but PMI uses iteration.) The sprint backlog is a list of everything that the team commits to achieve in each sprint, so you should break user stories into tasks (during sprint planning or earlier (as part of the product backlog). Use the second tab in the MS EXCEL template. You will not be using a tool like MS Project for sequencing sprint tasks in each sprint. Discuss in a couple of paragraphs whether MS Project would be necessary in the first place and explain briefly how you planned out the sequence of tasks within a sprint and suggest how those tasks could be tracked.

e. You should remove from the product backlog the items moved to the sprint backlog and then show the resulting product backlog. Notice how the template has space for the updated product backlog (after items are removed and placed on the sprint backlog), so you can show how the backlog changes as you progress through the sprints.

f. Definition of Done: This is the set of criteria for the Product Owner to sign off on the sprint completion. You can include this in the space provided in the tab for the first sprint - second tab in the template.

g. Finally, note that the cells in light green in the template are mostly planned information. The blue-shaded table corresponds to actual information, so you will need to enter in the hypothetical (but realistic) numbers there. For realism, you should assume that some sprints go according to plan, and some don't. This means that some sprints will complete their planned story points and some will fall short. The amber cell and the sprint buildup chart are derived automatically from the numbers in the blue cells, so do not change the numbers in the amber cells and do not tinker with the chart.

h. After completing the two parallel streams of sprints (three sprints in each stream), construct a buildup chart for the two streams of sprints combined, showing the cumulative number of story points completed per week for the two series combined. You can do that in the same EXCEL template (which you used for the product and sprint backlogs), and add a new tab for this whose title is Two-stream buildup chart.

i. Finally, compare and contrast the agile approach in the Session 7 Team Assignment with the traditional/waterfall approach using MS Project in the Session 4 Team Assignment and decide as a team which of the two approaches you believe is most appropriate for your chosen project. The justification for your answer should address multiple considerations like time to plan, convenience, quick value buildup, flexibility, simplicity, adaptability to change, transparency, customer satisfaction, which approach was more intuitive and realistic, etc.

j. Submit the completed MS EXCEL template (with the tab in h. added) and an MS WORD (or PDF) file with your essay response to i. above to your Session 7 team assignment folder.