My experience on agile teams

Someone asked me the other day what my experience on agile scrum teams has been like so I thought I'd write it out here as well.

Some of the teams that I’ve been on are much more structured than others when it comes to agile scrum implementation and use.  My most recent stint was at MasterControl where they did a pretty good job of it and are actively implementing SAFe right now.  When I first started there a couple months into it we all went to a big house in summit county (Park City area for those who don’t know where that it is) and we holed up there with tons of goodies and what not to plan out upcoming projects and things we were going to improve on in the coming year.  Essentially this was like a BIG sprint retrospective where you identify one or more things to do in the upcoming sprint (year) that will improve the overall efficiency of the dev team and for our stakeholders. 

Once we were back we went to work on those things.  My team worked on a 2 week sprint time frame.  We used workfront to track our projects, which were estimated by hours.  We met every week on Monday to talk through progress of each project, any impediments, and renegotiated what was to be done next or what needed some changes on the existing projects. 

Every day we held a daily standup to talk about what we’d worked on the day previous, what we were working on that day, and any impediments or items that were a dependency from somewhere else.  Afterwards the project managers could and would check in with other teams and the dev team/person assigned to a project to get a status update and help in removing said project along.

This was the bulk of my experience in our agile scrum teams with little nuances here and there with MasterControl.