You’ve made it to our last episode in the How We Scrum series. In this installment, I’ll walk you through our sprint retrospective. To catch up on older posts in this series, check out the Introduction, Our Scrum Roles, Our Backlog, Our Approach to Estimation, Our Sprint Planning, The Sprint, and Our Sprint Demo Session. We consider the Sprint Retrospective to be a very important part our Scrum process. The Sprint Retrospective happens at the end of each sprint, normally on Friday, after the Sprint Demo. This one-hour session helps us to get both positive and negative feedback from the team

In this, our seventh episode, I’ll give you a backstage pass to our sprint demo. Previous posts in our How We Scrum series include an Introduction, Our Scrum Roles, Our Backlog, Our Approach to Estimation, Our Sprint Planning, and The Sprint. At the end of every sprint, we have a sprint demo session. We normally schedule the demo on the last Friday of the sprint. We book one hour for the demo, however, it takes about 40 minutes on average. All team members are required to participate. As always, we connect the St. Petersburg and Munich offices by video conference and start our online show.

The sixth installment of How We Scrum shows you how we execute a sprint. Previously in this series, we published an Introduction, Our Scrum Roles, Our Backlog, Our Approach to Estimation, and Our Sprint Planning. Our Scrum Board When the planning session is over, the Scrum Master drags the planned user stories from the backlog to the sprint board and creates the appropriate tasks for each story. The sprint starts when the board is ready. Everyone is free to take an open task from the uppermost swimlane if possible and start working on it. We try keep only one task in progress for each te

This is the fifth episode in our How We Scrum series. This installment is devoted to our sprint planning. If you missed any of the previous posts, check out the Introduction, Our Scrum Roles, Our Backlog, and Our Approach to Estimation. The Sprint Planning event is an important part of our Scrum activities. We have planning sessions at the beginning of every two-week sprint. We get the whole team together, including QA Engineers, UX Designers, Support Engineers, Technical Writers, and Marketing Managers to discuss the user stories that we want to take for the upcoming sprint.  

Previous installments in the How We Scrum series include the Introduction, Our Scrum Roles, and Our Backlog. The fourth post is devoted to our approach to estimation. Last year, we introduced the #NoEstimates approach to our Scrum process. Instead of using estimations and spent time to calculate the burndown, we track our progress based on the number of user stories we finish in each sprint. The main concept behind this approach is that our sprint goal is to deliver a set of user stories and it doesn’t matter how many tasks we need to complete to achieve this goal. The benefit of this ap

Previously we published the Introduction and Our Scrum Roles installments from the How We Scrum series. This post is the third in the series and is devoted to our product backlog. In our case, the product backlog is a set of features that we plan to build for YouTrack. At JetBrains in general, and in the YouTrack team in particular, we conduct a comprehensive planning session at least once a year. We gather the whole team for several days outside the office and discuss our plans from different perspectives: what do our customers want, what’s important from our point of view, and what do

In the previous post, I outlined the steps we took to implement a Scrum methodology in the  YouTrack team. The first step in our Scrum transformation was to define who would take on each of the core roles. Product Owner In the YouTrack team, the Product Owner is responsible for prioritising issues in the product backlog and deciding what we do next. The Product Owner keeps a finger on the pulse to make sure our product goals and mission meet the needs of our customers, while the team finds the best technical solutions to achieve these goals. In the YouTrack team, the Product Owner role

Introduction The YouTrack team has been practicing Scrum for several years. We decided to switch to Scrum six years ago, when we started to develop an agile board in YouTrack. Since dogfooding is a core concept at JetBrains, we decided to adopt a Scrum practice ourselves and develop a tool for customers that conformed to the main principles of an agile framework. So, as our first Scrum Master told us, we started with a physical board. As we developed our agile board, we ported the physical board to YouTrack. After a while, we realized that we are happy with Scrum, and went further with our t