Danube - Who is on the Scrum Team? - Comments

shippable vs. sellable

MichaelJames — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:00:50 -0500

To help people get what DrDan's saying here, I sometimes explain "potentially shippable" does not mean "potentially sellable." We might have "Hello World!" fully tested, refactored, and documented. But not many would buy it until we get more stories done.

"Potentially shippable" is mostly a technical distinction, while "potentially sellable" is a Product Owner call.

--mj

Comment on "potentially shippable"

Dan Rawsthorne — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:37:37 -0500

MJ states, above, that the team's job is to produce an increment of potentially shippable product every sprint. This is the party line, and I believe it, but I get lots of questions about what potentially shippable product means. It does not mean shippable, as that is way too high a bar. We develop stories (PBIs), that combine to produce shippable features - it makes no sense for a story to be shippable by itself, IMHO.

What we mean is, if the feature is shippable (from a functionality perspective), then each of the stories that makes up the feature is shippable (from a quality perspective). So, stories that are done have the quality they need to be able to ship them, which means that the feature they are part of can be shipped as soon as it is functional - no waiting time to add in the quality! The way I refer to this is that the stories are demonstrably done every sprint.

Same concept, different words.

Dan ;-)

dan@danube.com
Dan Rawsthorne, PhD, CST
Transformation Coach
http://www.danube.com

Who is on the Scrum Team?

MichaelJames — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:38:51 -0500

A Scrum Team is:

A Product Owner
A Scrum Development Team
A ScrumMaster