Scrum: How to understand stand up and burn down is effective ?

Scrum burn down chart and daily stand up meeting are the most important part of the scrum process to keep the team on focus. Scrum is good on bring transparency in development process. With utilizing better engineering practice like test driven development, continuous integration we could keep our productivity and fun on the same line.

If you are one of those  people who are wondering

What is called “stand up”?

I have a brief for you.

scrum stand up meeting

On the picture you could see, there are few people who are standing up and discussing about the following 3 topics -

1. What i have done yesterday!
2. What i will do today!
3. Where i have been stucking!

This is a required daily meeting where 10 minutes are spent together with all team members, this meeting is used to adjust the tasks among the team members also to monitor the current status.

Later this meeting is followed by a burn down chart which is attach on the wall or send through email to everyone or upload on some place which is visible to everyone.

scrum burn down chart

What is burn down chart ?

Burn down chart is a graph which is used to visualize how much hours work is left in an iteration (sprint). on the illustration you’d see a white line which is visualizing average burning hours per day. If we have planned for 180 hours tasks for whole iteration. Average burning hours should be minimum 180 / 8 days (if you have 8 days span sprint) = 22.5 hours to keep us on target.

The green line is visualizing the real team progress, you see this is not always up to the base line. It is moving up and down thus we are determining how the team is performing. If this green line is too upwards from the base line it means we are behind the schedule if that goes far below from the base line that reflects bad planning.

How to understand your team is understanding them?

I found the following symptoms to understand that our team members are understanding the importance -

• Everyone attending daily stand up on time.
• Everyone feeling responsible and notifying before they get late in office.
• Everyone eagerly reporting their status and taking commitment for today
• Team members are feeling guilty if some of them didn’t complete the commitment
• Everyone eagerly waiting to see the change in burn down chart
• If burn down shows some upward progress everyone get concerns and work hard
• Everyone feeling proud of the progress which shows in burn down.
• Everyone working every day not waiting for last moments push.
• Everyone keeping their daily commitments
• When burn down curve is  not moving too upward or not falling too downwards.

Most important change in scrum is your team doesn’t need to work over night or over weekend to keep progress around the base line. (i will later discuss about how iterative and incremental planning can help). Fortunately we have discovered these changes on our current team.

The most important thing is feeling the “team way” which we are missing in most of our teams, I guess utilizing the tools and process like scrum that can be improved a lot.

best wishes,

How do you manage your url in php application ? (for CodeIgnitor guys)

Recently i had a post in phpexperts group where i wanted to emphasis on managed url. hard coding url is not a good practice besides it ended up with lot of changes on tested code.

Hi,
It has been long while since i last post here in phpexperts group, well i was
away from php for pretty long, being more java and ruby on rails guy when i got
chance to help few php projects, i borrowed few more neat and nifty design
concept from rails to php.

well let me tell you about the story of stories, i ain’t treat myself as php
expert anymore since being detached or keeping my ass out of it. i’d prefer to
call myself as the expert of “work for fun”.

before digging into the details let me explain what was wrong and what could be
wrong with your current way of using URL through out the php application (web
site)

-> Karim, he is given a task to develop a beautiful WOW WOW application in php,

-> He is very WOW WOW developer, develops everything on the fly, produces
(TR/Z/B)*illion of bugs on the fly as well.

-> Very promonient developer, he knows how to write php along html, after
hearing several good advices he started giving CodeIgnitor a shot.

-> So he used to write the following kinda code in everywhere -

<a href=”<?= site_url(“user/profile/10″) ?>”>My profile</a>

Now if you get a chance to look into his view or controller codes, you might see
in everywhere he hard coded the url pattern.

what the hell is the URL Pattern?

well, you see “site_url(“user/profile/10″)” this code is expanded to
“http://abc.com/user/profile/10” while you execute your code in php. this
“user/profile/:number” is called url pattern.

everywhere in his code base he kept such hard coded url pattern.
let’s imagine his client or boss or team lead ask him to change the url pattern
“user/profile/:number” to something similar “profile/:number/”.

now tell me what would YOU DO? if you were placed in such situation?

well you know if that guy was me, i’d run a string replace command through out
the whole project. so wherever i wrote “user/profile/:number” url pattern that
would be converted to “profile/:number”

something like this – /site_url\(“user\/profile\/(\d+)”\)/ replace to
site_url(“profile/$1″)

well i guess many of you already have such problem with similar solution
frankly speaking we had similar problem thus we came up with some solution where
we can change URL pattern without modifying existing view or controller code.

here is the evidence -
<a href=”<?= $this->url->profile(array(“username” => $user_profile->username))
?>”>
<img src=”<?= $this->url->avatar(array(“username” => $user_profile->username))
?>” />
</a>

you see, we ain’t hard coding any url anymore, rather we are calling a function
which are automatically generating from the following kinda configuration -
$urls["profile"] = “http://:username.:host/community“;
$urls["avatar"] = “http://avatar.somewherein.net/avatar/:username/for/aawaj“;
$urls["logout"] = “logout”;

i am pretty sure you guys are smart enough to figure out how we did that, let me
know if you need any help about how we did that.

well first you try yourself and tell me how we did

read the rest of the thread here
you can find out solution here

best wishes,

work for fun!