SCRUM and contributing volunteers

[smaffulli]

Hello, I'm Funambol community manager and I've been looking for other free/libre software projects that use SCRUM internally. I'm trying to understand how others manage to involve external contributors, volunteers, in strictly time constrained release cycles mandated by SCRUM. Pentaho wiki has a very interesting paper on the topic, but I don't understand how you involve community in the development process.

For example, if somebody wants to help fixing one of the bugs on JIRA how can she do it? In other words can you assign an issue to somebody that is not a paid developer? Did this ever happen?

[dmoran]

There are community members that have taken on the responsibility for community maintained projects like PAT and CDF. They do get assigned cases by Pentaho PM and by others working in the project. These projects are not part of the current sprint process that Pentaho dev uses internally but we try to keep them up to date so we can sync features with releases.

We have not been following the open SCRUM as outlined in the wiki but are moving towards that. The plan is to increase the transparency, and fill in the backlog and get to a point where the community knows what backlog items are scheduled to be worked in an upcoming sprint and let them commit to a feature. They would also have the option to implement it before the scheduled sprint in which case the sprint task would be integration, documentation and testing.

I'd appreciate your feedback from your project

Doug

[pstoellberger]

Just for completion the correct links: PAT and CDF

[dmoran]

Thanks, I fixed them. Strange that they work on my machine without the complete domain. Must be the VPN fixing them up since I'm remote.

[smaffulli]

Hi Doug,

thanks for the info.

We have not been following the open SCRUM as outlined in the wiki but are moving towards that. The plan is to increase the transparency, and fill in the backlog and get to a point where the community knows what backlog items are scheduled to be worked in an upcoming sprint and let them commit to a feature. They would also have the option to implement it before the scheduled sprint in which case the sprint task would be integration, documentation and testing.

we're doing something similar for the core Funambol product we publish the list of user stories being worked on in the actual sprint. We plan to publish the full backlog too, once we sort out some issues with the tool we use to manage the SCRUM development.

On the Android Client for Funambol we're experimenting a slightly modified openSCRUM process. The backlog of user stories are public and contributors can join in any time. We leave to the contributor the freedom to chose the delivering date. We're getting good code contributed, but communication can be improved, as most of it happens with 1-to-1 instant messaging.

Will you be at OSCON 2009? It would be nice to have a chat together about this topic.
stef