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Have you ever worked on a (full-time) project where using Agile methodologies actually allowed you to accomplish a 40-hour work-week? If so, what were the most valuable agile practices?
Yes, I’m on a 40 hour (actually it’s 37.5 hours or so, that’s what my contract says) on a project that was run with SCRUM from the beginning. That was about 2 years ago and the first time we implemented SCRUM. It’s the project with the least amount of overtime for me personally, and it’s also a PC game we’re developing. I’m not even in ‘crunch’ mode right now even though we’re shipping an open beta on Friday.
We have learned a lot since then about SCRUM and agile. The single most valuable lesson from my point of view is: pod sizes must be reasonable … we started out with pods with 12-20 members, that didn’t work out well at all. A maximum of 10 should not be exceeded. It’s too easy to agree on ‘flaky’ and ‘vague’ tasks because otherwise the standup & task planning meetings would take too long. So keep the pod size small and the tasks specific and get the product owner or sign-off’s together with those who will work on the task.
Also, with a bi-weekly task planning schedule you have to get every Product Owner to agree on the task list and priorities for the current sprint, and new task requests should be issued before that planning meeting or else it will be ignored for the current sprint. This forced us to improve on inter-pod communication.