Reddit reviews Planning Extreme Programming

The most important thing is to make sure that members of the development team are choosing what they sign up for. There should not be a leader who is telling each person which task to do. Our teams should be self-organizing to carry out the product backlog items during the sprint. In sprint planning, my team will identify user stories we can fit in the sprint and then break them down into tasks. Developers will then get to choose which of these tasks they want to sign up for.

Today I read something interesting about sprint planning from one of the early contributors of the scrum framework. He recommends leaving sprint planning with each person having only signed up for 1 task. He recommends the rest of the tasks being unassigned at this time. After you finish your first task, you can then choose which task to do next. The reason for this is that fixing who does which task creates bottlenecks.

Suppose each team member signs up for 2 high priority tasks and 2 lower priority tasks. If one person finishes both of their high priority tasks early and another person gets behind, it would be better for this first person to help out with the other guy's high priority task as opposed to starting on a low priority task. From Planning Extreme Programming, it is natural for some tasks within a user story to depend on each other. If you are fixing who does which work, someone can find their task blocked when a teammate is behind on the task that was supposed to unblock their task. As a result, we need the flexibility to adjust who does which task during the sprint. This will ensure we are always working on the higher priority items and are able to resolve dependencies between tasks.

Lastly, keep in mind that scrum asks that we produce a potentially shippable product increment each sprint. Anytime that a bottleneck arises that is preventing us from producing a potentially shippable product increment, we need to be able to have our team members step up and help remove the bottleneck. We can't do that if we are fixing who does which work.