Scrumming at Licensing

License eXpress was the first product delivered by the first Scrum team at Department of Licensing. Building on the success of that first Scrum team in 2012, Licensing now has over 60 IT staff participating on 10 Scrum teams. Instead of dissolving at the end of a project, the teams stay intact pulling in new projects and work. Products of the teams include: improved Firearm licensing system, Seahawks and Sounders license plates, and the upcoming 6-year Driver license.
Over the past few months here are some of the insights from the teams:

  • New teams take at least 5 sprints to run smoothly (DOL has two-week sprints).
  • Developers tend to be overly optimistic about how much work they can accomplish and still leave time for testing. Teams have recognized they have to resist pulling in too many stories and setting a target that can't be reached.
  • Having the business product owner at the daily standup and sprint planning meetings transforms the way they view IT work (the lights go on about how a seemingly simple request gets complicated).
  • The developer's role has to change during the sprint, from pure development to testing support, for the entire team to be most productive.
  • The team's velocity history has to be put to use when planning realistic sprints.
  • Integrating production support into Scrum backlogs is harder than it looks. Some teams are using a separate Kanban board to work Production Support in parallel with the sprint backlog.

You can see some of the Scrum team products, including Seahawks license plates at: https://www.dol.wa.gov/licenseexpress.html