Removing Impediments
One of my scrum teams was recently struggling to get through some items because of the time the software was taking to build in Visual Studio 2005. The solution has over 20 projects in it and is centred around a precompiled ASP.NET 2.0 Web Site project.
The first step was to change was the project style. The team switched over to the Web Application Project type and compile times dropped from around 10 minutes to around 10 seconds - the developers were definitely pleased about this.
However, things were still a bit slow, especially in the VS2005 environment itself. Productivity tools like ReSharper and other addins were not being used because of the extra RAM required. In fact most machines were using upwards of 1.2GB in RAM, even without the add-ons, yet each machine only had 1 GB in the box. So I did the obvious thing and purchased an extra 1 GB for each developer machine and had it all installed straight away.
VS2005 now runs quite nicely, thank you very much, and the dev team are now much much happier and much more productive - especially when doing bug fixes which is a process heavily dependant on recompilation.
In case it's not obvious - for your Scrum teams to succeed it's critical that you give your scrum teams what they need to get the job done and remove any impediments as quickly as possible. Doing otherwise will only lead to frustration, turnover and angst amongst your team(s) and reduce your overall velocity.
P.S. This doesn't mean you turn yourself into a shopping cart and go out and buy the developers anything they want - it needs to be things linked to specific impediments and not something that will either not be used very often or a distraction from getting work done.
The first step was to change was the project style. The team switched over to the Web Application Project type and compile times dropped from around 10 minutes to around 10 seconds - the developers were definitely pleased about this.
However, things were still a bit slow, especially in the VS2005 environment itself. Productivity tools like ReSharper and other addins were not being used because of the extra RAM required. In fact most machines were using upwards of 1.2GB in RAM, even without the add-ons, yet each machine only had 1 GB in the box. So I did the obvious thing and purchased an extra 1 GB for each developer machine and had it all installed straight away.
VS2005 now runs quite nicely, thank you very much, and the dev team are now much much happier and much more productive - especially when doing bug fixes which is a process heavily dependant on recompilation.
In case it's not obvious - for your Scrum teams to succeed it's critical that you give your scrum teams what they need to get the job done and remove any impediments as quickly as possible. Doing otherwise will only lead to frustration, turnover and angst amongst your team(s) and reduce your overall velocity.
P.S. This doesn't mean you turn yourself into a shopping cart and go out and buy the developers anything they want - it needs to be things linked to specific impediments and not something that will either not be used very often or a distraction from getting work done.