Gearing up with Scrum

The guy in-charge of implementing Scrum at our office did an introductory session today at office. It creates a major break through from traditional project management by breaking up tasks in to manageable pieces, and short achievable deadlines. Tasks are generated in the form of User Stories and put up in the Product Backlog. A Product Owner will be responsible to prioritizing these user stories and will create a Release Backlog. A release backlog will have many Sprints which are either 2-4 weeks in length. The scrum team will be coached by a Scrum Master, who is in charge of driving the team. At the end of each sprint a working product should be available to show to the customer.

During the session many other colleagues asked their doubts and concerns over the process. I asked two questions for my part:

1. If there is any particular feature request which the overall functionality could only be implemented for more than 4 weeks, how do we convince the customer?

Answer : No task can span more than 4 weeks. If there is such functionality it should be discussed with the team and should be broken into small chunks. Or such a sprint cannot continue.

     2. Regarding stakeholders, there are two roles; Involving or Committing. Will a particular resource(ex: A developer) be assigned to multiple scrum teams in parallel?

Answer : No. Scrum doesn't permit.

There was a nice video shared by a colleague which gives a quick insight into Scrum:

Tip to avoid flickers caused by Memory consuming controls.

You might face a situation where some standard or 3rd party controls being used in your application across various forms/windows. In any case you have a situation where you don't close any of the forms where those controls are being used, instead you hide them for some reason. These controls might cause a flickering effect on other forms particularly when the hosting machine is slow.

Recently I came across such a situation where an opensource listview control was causing a black ribbon like effect on other screens. After trying various ways, I was able to avoid it by disabling the visibility of it upon the Form Leave / Page Leave event.