Working in a team
Software is built by teams, and teams need a shared way of working. Follow five task cards through one sprint: they wait in a prioritised backlog, get story-point estimates, move across a Kanban board under a work-in-progress limit, get unblocked at a daily stand-up, pass review into Done with their docs, and the retrospective turns a lesson into the next card.
5 quick questions
Pick an answer to see why. Your score saves with your progress.
01What is a backlog?
The Scrum Guide calls the product backlog an ordered list of what is needed to improve the product. The team takes work from the top.
02Doing has a WIP limit of 2 and already holds two cards. What should happen to a third card?
A work-in-progress limit stops the team starting more than it can finish. By Little's Law, fewer items in progress means each one spends less time in progress on average.
03A team estimates one card at 2 story points and another at 8. What does that mean?
Story points are relative sizes. They compare cards with each other; they are not hours and not priority.
04At the stand-up Ben says his card is blocked. What is the best next step?
Raising a blocker early and getting help keeps work moving at a pace people can keep up. Lone heroics hide problems and burn people out.
05What is a retrospective for?
The Scrum Guide says the Sprint Retrospective plans ways to increase quality and effectiveness. It is about how the team works, not who to blame.
Glossary
- Backlog
- An ordered list of the work still to do. The most valuable item sits on top.
- Sprint
- A short, fixed stretch of work (one month or less, often two weeks) with a goal the team aims to finish.
- Story points
- A relative size estimate for a task: a 2 is about twice a 1. Not hours.
- Kanban board
- A board with one column per stage of work (for example To do, Doing, Review, Done) and one card per task.
- WIP limit
- The most work-in-progress items a column may hold at once. It keeps the team finishing before starting.
- Stand-up
- A short daily meeting (15 minutes in Scrum) to check progress and raise anything that is stuck.
- Retrospective
- A meeting at the end of a sprint to look back at how the team worked and pick something to improve.
- On call
- Taking a turn to answer alerts from live software, usually helped by a runbook: written steps for known problems.
Notes and sources
- This lesson mixes two popular ways of working. Scrum gives the sprint, the backlog, the daily stand-up and the retrospective; Kanban gives the board with WIP limits. Many teams use a bit of both, and some run Kanban with no sprints at all.
- Story points are a team's own yardstick: 5 points in one team means nothing to another, and comparing teams by points does more harm than good.
- Little's Law holds for averages over a long, steady stretch. It does not promise any single card will take exactly that long.
- Google's SRE book recommends that on-call work stays a small share of an engineer's time, with enough people in the rotation that nights are rare.
- Each team writes its own definition of done. The Scrum Guide only requires that one exists and that every item meets it before it counts as done.
- K. Schwaber and J. Sutherland, The Scrum Guide (2020)
- D. Vacanti and J. Coleman, The Kanban Guide
- J. D. C. Little, A Proof for the Queuing Formula: L = λW, Operations Research 9(3), 1961
- M. Cohn, Agile Estimating and Planning (Prentice Hall, 2005)
- Manifesto for Agile Software Development
- Principles behind the Agile Manifesto
- Google, Site Reliability Engineering, chapter 11: Being On-Call
Quiz Unlocks after the last step.