#12. Co-hosts, Neil and Dermot (yes, he's back!), discuss the sprint backlog.

• What is the sprint backlog and how does it relate to the product backlog?
   Who is responsible for the sprint backlog and who can change it?
• How the development team and the product owner negotiate the contents of the sprint backlog, with the help of the scrum master.
• The effect of swapping items out of the sprint backlog.
   How to handle capacity issues towards the end of the sprint when you’re ahead of or behind schedule.
• Using a ‘Definition of Ready’ to ensure that stories selected for the sprint backlog can be developed into working features within the sprint.
• Using velocity from recent sprints to forecast capacity for the upcoming sprint and how to adjust it for team members’ availability.
• The types of product backlog items that can go into your sprint backlog, and whether it’s useful to use tasks to track progress during a sprint.
• Should we separate out the business value delivered during the sprint from the velocity delivered during the sprint?
• Using a physical Scrum board or a digital Scrum board, such as Visual Studio Team Services, and benefits and drawbacks of each, and the challenge of keeping them in sync if you decide to use both.
• How to know when a product backlog item is complete at the end of the sprint, what to do if an item wasn’t finished, and why you should finish one item before starting another one.

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

#11. Estimating product backlog items using planning poker is the topic for this episode.

• The benefits of planning poker: gain a shared understanding of the work, bring diverse perspectives to the estimation process and estimate the work as we learn about the Dynamics 365 system.
• Who plays planning poker: the role of Scrum team developers, the product owner and proxy product owners in estimation.
• When to play planning poker during each sprint: sprint planning and storytime.
   What to play planning poker with: planning poker cards, PlanningPoker.com, Planitpoker.com or Scrumpoker.online, or ScrumPoker4Devs from the Visual Studio Marketplace.
• How to play planning poker: describe the requirement, estimate independently, reveal estimations, discuss outliers and play again until a consensus is reached.
• Things to do before you play: agree your estimation units and scale, baseline user story and definition of done.

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

#10. Neil compares the to-do list on his 100-year old house to the product backlog and goes on to describe:

• Using epics to capture your project scope
• Getting your product backlog started
• Estimating backlog items using story points and not t-shirt sizes or ideal days
• User stories, spikes, chores and bugs
• The product backlog in sprint planning and sprint reviews
• Refining the product backlog in storytime workshops
• Managing the backlog in Atlassian JIRA or Visual Studio Team Services.

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

#9. Neil is joined by Nick Doelman (@ReadyXRM) who shares his experience learning Scrum and applying it to one of his recent Dynamics 365 projects.

During the episode we cover:

• Nick’s background in Dynamics 365 since CRM 1.0 beta
• Some of his recent projects for a community organisation organising summer camps, classic car auctioneer, certification portal for a company in the mining industry, a telecommunications company in the Caribbean, a reinsurance company, and others
• Before starting a large Dynamics 365 implementation, Nick got started with Scrum by taking some online training courses
• Using the Scrum Framework on Pluralsight
•  Introduction to Scrum for Dynamics 365 by Neil Benson
• Using planning poker for team estimation of product backlog items
• Finding unicorns and sunshine in the sprint retrospective
• Daily scrums as camaraderie-building check-in for remote teams
• The possibility of using pair programming and other technical practices in Scrum projects
• Using Visual Studio Team Services features such as tags in Scrum projects
• Nick will be presenting three sessions at D365UG Summit in Phoenix in October

Remember to download the Scrum Terms Worksheet for a handy guide to all the Scrum terms you hear in this episode.

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

#8. Dermot and Neil answer questions submitted by podcast listeners about:

1. Estimating chores to reduce technical debt (Todd Mercer).
2. Prioritizing items with dependencies and the principle of emergent design (Alan Rachid).
3. Whether business analysts are part of the development team or not (Greta Sharples).
4. Planning agile projects, especially in the sales cycle (Jeffry van de Vuurst).

You can submit your questions by tweeting @customery or clicking on the Send Voicemail button anywhere on the Customery website.

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

#7. Dermot and Neil discuss sprints and the daily scrum events in a Scrum project. 

• What's the ideal sprint length when you're using Scrum on a Dynamics 365 project?
• When is it a good idea to use special sprints like Sprint 0 or a hardening sprint?
• Can you cancel a sprint?
• What's the purpose of the daily scrum?
• How can we run the daily scrum with remote teams?

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

#6. Neil and Dermot discuss the development team in a Scrum project implementing Dynamics 365.

Covered in this show:

• The role of the development team in a Scrum project
• What it means to be cross-functional and self-organizing
• How many developers should be in your dev team

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

#5. This episode of Scrum Dynamics is brought to you live from the Dynamics 365 User Group Summit EMEA in Dublin, Ireland. In this session, Neil covers the basics of Scrum and best practices for each of Scrum’s roles, events, and deliverables from his Dynamics 365 and CRM projects over the last ten years. He also highlights the lessons learned from his first Scrum for Dynamics CRM project at Premier Medical Group.

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

#4. Neil and Dermot discuss the role of the scrum master in a Dynamics 365 project.

• A servant leader
• Is the scrum master a project manager?
• The role of the scrum master in sprint events
• The three questions a scrum master asks during daily standup
• Project planning
• Reviews and retrospectives
• Do Dynamics 365 scrum masters need to be Microsoft certified?
• Can scrum masters have other scrum team roles such as product owner or developer?
• What are the characteristics of a good scrum master
• Techniques that a scrum master should know
• Can a client provide their own scrum master when the dev team is from a Microsoft partner?

Remember to download the Scrum Terms Worksheet for a handy guide to all the Scrum terms you hear in this episode.

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil

#3. Neil introduces the role of the Product Owner in Dynamics 365 projects, including:

• The primary responsibility of the Product Owner
• Five ways the Product Owner manages the Product Backlog
• Characteristics of great Product Owners
• How a Product Owner spends their time
• How to use Proxy Product Owners
• Top ten tips for Product Owners
• Where do Product Owners come from?

Remember to download the Scrum Terms cheat sheet for a handy guide to all the Scrum terms you hear in this episode.

CONNECT
🌏 Amazing Apps website
🟦 Customery on LinkedIn
🟦 Neil Benson on LinkedIn

MY ONLINE COURSES
🚀 Agile Foundations for Microsoft Business Apps
🏉 Scrum for Microsoft Business Apps
📐 Estimating Business Apps

Keep experimenting 🧪
-Neil