© 2015 Randy Bone

Understanding Scrum

Scrum: Values and Getting Value

Randy Bone

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© 2015 Randy Bone

Rules: Stop Sign❖ Stop Sign Rules:

❖ Stop

❖ Check

❖ Proceed When Safe

❖ There are exceptions to these rules.

❖ If you misjudge an exception, you might pay a price:

❖ Cause an Accident

❖ Pay a Fine

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Rules: Scrum

❖ Vast majority of time, it is best to follow Scrum’s fundamental rules.

❖ There are exceptions to the rules.

❖ If you misjudge when to make an exception, there can be consequences:

❖ You might fail where others succeed.

❖ You might appear subversive.

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Scrum: Why Should I Be Interested?

❖ Developer

❖ Team is self-organizing and continuously improving.

❖ Manager

❖ Team is more predictable.

❖ Stakeholder

❖ Participate in feedback loop.

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Scrum Relationship to Agile

❖ Agile is a Framework.

❖ Methodologies that implement the Agile Framework:

❖ Kanban

❖ Scrum

❖ Others…

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Agile Values❖ www.agilemanfesto.org

❖ 4 bullets

❖ …we have come to value:

❖ Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

❖ Working software over comprehensive documentation

❖ Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

❖ Responding to change over following a plan

❖ That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

❖ 12 Principles

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Scrum Fundamentals

❖ Roles

❖ Ceremonies (Meetings)

❖ Values

❖ We will focus on Values first, rather than last or not at all.

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Who Knows About Scrum Values?

❖ At the 2014 “Give Thanks for Scrum” event, Jeff Sutherland asked:

❖ How many people are here are Certified Scrum Masters (CSMs)?

❖ Most people raised their hands.

❖ How many people know there are Scrum Values?

❖ About half the raised their hands.

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Scrum Values

❖ Openness

❖ Courage

❖ Respect

❖ Focus

❖ Commitment

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Scrum Value: Openness

❖ Facilitates Collaboration

❖ Threatens Subversive People

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Scrum Value: Courage

❖ Express concern without recrimination.

❖ Health of organization measured by how well bad news can flow up org chart.

❖ Should not protect subversion or disloyalty.

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Scrum Value: Respect

❖ Respect for:

❖ Fellow Team Members

❖ If team members are fighting, energy is spent on fight.

❖ The Customer and Project

❖ The Company and Shareholders

❖ People who only promote themselves at the expense of the customer, team and company are displaying the opposite of Respect.

❖ These people often vehemently insist they are indispensable.

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Respect Example

❖ Meetings start and end on time.

❖ If meeting will run over, get permission to extend.

❖ If anyone cannot extend, reschedule.

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Scrum Value: Focus

❖ Team members are not distracted by context switching.

❖ Team members know where they stand.

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Scrum Value: Commitment❖ Team members are highly professional and motivated.

❖ Team members who are subversive or uncommitted are eventually asked to leave the team.

❖ Scrum is stupid, I’m not doing it.

❖ Subversion

❖ I did not know I was suppose to be working on that!

❖ Scrum values foster transparency.

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Scrum Roles

❖ Team

❖ Scrum Master

❖ Product Owner

❖ Team Member

❖ Stake Holder

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Scrum Roles:Team/Stake Holder

❖ Team does the work.

❖ Stake Holders Represent Anyone with Vested Interest:

❖ People who pay for the work.

❖ Users/Testers

❖ Executive Management

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Team: Product Owner

❖ Interface between team and Stakeholders.

❖ Maintains Product Backlog.

❖ Refines Sprint Backlog for each Sprint.

❖ Responsible for Product Profitability.

❖ All this responsibility, yet still must respect team (and not assign work).

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Team: Scrum Master

❖ Guides team through Scrum process.

❖ Teams get derailed by inexperienced Scrum Masters.

❖ Guards boundaries of the team.

❖ Teams get derailed because Scrum Master not given authority to truly guard team.

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Teams: Team Member

❖ Provides 10% of time to Product Owner for refinement of next Sprint Backlog.

❖ Pulls work at Sprint Planning Meeting.

❖ Shows accomplishments at Sprint Review Meeting.

❖ Suggests improvements at Sprint Retrospective.

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Scrum Ceremonies (Meetings)

❖ Sprint Planning Meeting

❖ Sprint Review

❖ Sprint Retrospective

❖ Daily Scrum (Standup)

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Scrum Ceremony: Sprint Planning Meeting

❖ Before meeting starts, entire team is already familiar with Sprint Backlog because they helped the Product Owner create it.

❖ Team estimates items in Sprint Backlog.

❖ Each team member pulls items from Sprint Backlog.

❖ Some items may not get pulled.

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Scrum Ceremony: Sprint Review

❖ Each Team Member Shows Accomplishments

❖ This meeting may be attended by Stake Holders.

❖ Stake Holders may not speak.

❖ If a Stake Holder has a concern, they express that to the Product Owner after the meeting.

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Scrum Ceremony: Sprint Retrospective

❖ Chance for team to review sprint and suggest improvements.

❖ Usually, only the team attends.

❖ Need extremely high trust levels for anyone else to attend.

❖ Team never discusses outside of meeting.

❖ If anyone “rats” on a problem, team trust is broken.

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Scrum Ceremony: Daily Scrum

❖ Each team member makes a statement to answer each of the following questions:

❖ What did I do yesterday for the team?

❖ What do I plan to do today for the team?

❖ What blocking issues do I have (or say “no blocking issues”).

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Daily Scrum Cont.

❖ After any team member makes the 3 statements, it is okay to say “Can I check with you after?”

❖ It is NOT okay to ask someone a question!

❖ This disrespects team by breaking rhythm of Daily Scrum.

❖ Asking a question disrespects the time of people who may not be involved in question/response.

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Daily Scrum Disasters

❖ “I do not remember what I did yesterday.”

❖ Shows lack of focus and commitment.

❖ Shows lack of respect for team and project.

❖ Makes a mockery of Scrum.

❖ This person should be asked by Scrum Master to re-examine their commitment to being prepared for this meeting.

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Daily Scrum Disasters

❖ “You know, I had an interesting problem…”

❖ This person thought the Daily Scrum was a forum for story telling.

❖ This person was eventually let go.

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Daily Scrum Disasters

❖ “I do not care about stupid rules, I’m going to get to the bottom of this now.”

❖ The Scrum Master must be empowered enforce Scrum rules.

❖ If Scrum Master is unwilling or unable to enforce the rules of Scrum, then the team is not doing Scrum.

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Daily Scrum Disasters❖ Daily Scrum lasts 45 minutes.

❖ This is a sign of many of instances of not following the Scrum.

❖ This is a sign that the Scrum Master is unwilling/unable to truly lead the team through the Scrum process.

❖ It is time to think about obtaining Scrum training and coaching.

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Product Backlog

❖ Any team member (including Product Owner and Scrum Master) can add items.

❖ Any Stake Holder can add items.

❖ There may still be items in Product Backlog when product complete.

❖ An example is a nice-to-have item that customer does not want to pay for.

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Sprint Backlog❖ Product Owner works with Customer to determine

most important items on Product Backlog.

❖ Work most important items because these are the least likely to change.

❖ Product Owner works with developers to break down epics.

❖ An epic is any backlog item that would take one developer more than half a sprint to complete.

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Ready for First Sprint Planning Meeting?

❖ If team members are ready to estimate and pull work items in Sprint Backlog, then proceed with first Sprint Planning Meeting.

❖ If team members are not ready, implement Sprint Zero.

❖ If Spring Planning Meeting starts, and people have no idea about what they are estimating, stop meeting and implement Sprint Zero.

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Sprint Zero

❖ In each Sprint, team member owe 10% of their time to Product Owner to prepare for next sprint.

❖ The time is spent refining the Sprint Backlog for each subsequent sprint.

❖ Sprint Zero is the preparation time for Sprint One.

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Sprint Planning Meeting Disasters

❖ Estimating in hours instead of story points.

❖ Humans tend to be better at comparing.

❖ Nobody knows why they are doing Planning Poker.

❖ Somebody makes the mistake of assigning Work, rather than letting the team Pull work.

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Sprint Review Meeting

❖ Stake Holders see progress.

❖ Team members are acknowledged for accomplishments.

❖ Acknowledgement is VERY important.

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Sprint Review Meeting Disasters

❖ Manager is furious that individuals are getting acknowledged for their work.

❖ Stake holders/Manager wants to check work before it can be called “done.”

❖ Stake holders do not see any progress.

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Sprint Retrospective Meeting

❖ No external people allowed (unless trust levels are extremely high).

❖ For the improvement of the team.

❖ Pick top improvement item and implement.

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Sprint Retrospective Meeting Disasters

❖ Personal Attacks

❖ Food helps mitigate this.

❖ Comparing Story Points to other teams.

❖ Allowing outsiders.

❖ Breaking trust.

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Benefits of Scrum to Team

❖ Team is self-organizing.

❖ Team is continuously improving.

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Benefits of Scrum Negated

❖ Team incurs overhead of Scrum but gets no benefit.

❖ Scrum used as an excuse to micromanage and berate.

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Team Velocity❖ Team may see slight decrease in performance first 2-3

sprints.

❖ Team should see a significant performance improvement after that.

❖ If no improvement, what’s the point of implementing an Agile methodology?

❖ This can be a red flag that the team does not understand the Scrum fundamentals.

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Developer Happiness

❖ Rules are well understood and consistently enforced.

❖ Social Acceptance

❖ Have a way to measure progress.

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How to Cheat at Scrum❖ First off, DO NOT CHEAT!

❖ You only defeat yourself in the end.

❖ People in this spot usually blame anything other than themselves.

❖ “I did not cheat - Scrum just does not work.”

❖ This is a false claim.

❖ The purpose of the following slides is to help you spot cheating!!!!!!

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Cheating at Scrum: Small Team❖ Team consists of 2-3 developers who:

❖ Already get along.

❖ Are highly skilled in all areas of the project.

❖ Good at reacting to political queues from management.

❖ May or may not take Scrum seriously.

❖ Project would have succeeded with or without Scrum, so how do you measure the impact of Scrum?

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Cheating at Scrum: Ignoring Story Points

❖ Human Beings are really bad at estimating in hours.

❖ Human Beings are really good at comparisons.

❖ Story Points facilitate estimation by comparison.

❖ Story Points are the Fibonacci Sequence:

❖ Fibonacci Sequence occurs in nature.

❖ Tee-shirt sizes are based on Fibonacci

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Cheating at Scrum: Gaming Story Points

❖ Team is told they should be increasing velocity with every subsequent Sprint.

❖ Team makes a secret pact to estimate similar-sized tasks with ever-higher story point numbers.

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Summary

❖ To successfully implement Scrum:

❖ Need all fundamentals:

❖ Values, Roles, and Ceremonies

❖ Need Management Commitment

❖ You can still get some value from implementing parts of Scrum, but you will not see the full potential of Scrum.

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Questions?

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