His Scrum Master's Voice

Why is this crazy person telling me to limit my WIP? As an agile coach I often come across situations where I need to encourage teams to reduce the amount of work they have in progress . Even though it sounds and feels counter intuitive to do less work, the fact is your team will get more DONE by doing fewer things at the same time. Activity != Progress In our scrum teams we naturally tend towards keeping everybody busy. Developers working on development tasks, testers working on testing tasks. History has skewed our mental model of what people should do at work so that we feel like we should always be busy, always processing work.  This is a good model for the mass production of widgets or the processing of mountains of paperwork BUT a bad model for the production of complex, functional, high quality software. We use user stories to represent units of complex, functional, high quality software and in scrum the game is to finish a number of these units every spr

In my last post about daily stand up meetings dated(2011!!) I mentioned the standard format these typically take: What did you do yesterday? What do you plan to do today? Do you have any blockers or impediments We are all familiar with the approach. However, I often see teams losing focus of their progression against sprint goals due to executing the stand up poorly.  If you find that going "round table" for individual updates is not providing any clarity on the progress of stories then it might be time for a change. Take this example: Yesterday, I had some meetings. I caught up with my emails and i had a dentist appointment in the afternoon Today I will catch up with Jane & Mike about Project Dilbert No blockers The format is correct  BUT the content was of little or no value. Why? Because the update was not pertaining to any of the user stories in the sprint and the progress being made towards its completion. My previous post states that we sh

Agile software development is a team sport. I see so many issues when working with software teams that I have also come across in a sports team context.  Teams are collections of people and to get a collection of individuals motivated and organised to achieve a common goal is not easy. I am convinced there is much we can learn from  the sporting arena to help us perform better as software teams. One example is the concept of  Individual efficiency vs group efficiency. Individual v team efficiency A lot of what is important for the success of sports teams is also valuable for software teams. We create teams with a view to the Team achieving more together than the individuals would on their own or because the task/ deadline before us is unachievable without extra man power.  Example : Amazing footballers like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Diego Maradona could not  achieve anything on their own, they need to operate within a team structure to achieve any great success

  When should you split a user story? Think "when would you slice a fruit?" A banana is big but manageable you'll probably eat it whole. You might want to slice it in certain circumstances. A peach could get messy so i'd rather slice it A kiwi is small but its hairy, i'm definitely slicing that! Deciding when to slice a user story is not always easy. Often its difficult to apply hard rules. Its usually a balance of size and complexity. In the above examples, a banana represents a big story that isn't complex, should size alone determine whether to split it?  The kiwi represents a story that is small but highly complex, we know its hairy, we know we shouldn't bite straight into it but how to slice it is not obvious either? peel first? slice first? The peach represents the story I see most often. It represents uncertainty. Once you bite into a peach you discover if it is hard, soft, juicy, extremely juicy! If you slice it up first then yo

One of the most common agile anti-patterns I witness is a compulsion towards breaking user stories into tasks. Tasks take focus away from stories The problem with tasks is that they take the focus away from user stories. Teams that focus on completing tasks risk losing sight of the real value which lies in the stories. They are often unable to see the wood for the trees. How often have you seen sprints that are? •             On day 9 of 10, but <30% of story points are complete •             On day 5 of 10, but <10% of story points are complete •             On day 9 of 10, with 90% of tasks complete, but still <30% of story points complete I firmly believe this is a by-product of too much focus on tasks and not enough focus on stories. Tasks themselves add little or no value on their own. I often see tasks such as “Manual QA”, “Code Review”, “Write test cases”, “Database work”, “Front end work”, “Back end work”. People often argue to me that the task breakd

About 6 months ago my team embarked on an initiative to upgrade our Continuous Integration (CI) & Automation pipeline. As an iOS team, the fact we already had a comprehensive suite of automated functional tests hooked up to Jenkins was impressive and gave us a solid foundation. However, our setup had started to creak at the seams. Inexplicable test failures, brittle tests, failing tests that miraculously worked if we gave them a swift kick in the nether regions and ran them again! We decided to evolve to a CI 2.0, which would be a lot more stable, massively reduce the amount of time we spent nursing our tests and ultimately give us better confidence in our system. We are not done yet but we have re-learned a number of basics along the way Lesson 1: with CI & automation, fast feedback is king Our monolithic test suites took hours to run. This discouraged developers from running them on every check-in, which is counter productive. Not running them means you increase the chan