ScrumMastering in the Real World. or What I Wish I Knew Before I Became a ScrumMaster

Transcription

1 ScrumMastering in the Real World or What I Wish I Knew Before I Became a ScrumMaster

2 The Zen of ScrumMastering

3 Michael J. Tardiff ScrumMaster, coach, consultant Certified Scrum Master, Certified Scrum Product Owner Lotsa years experience delivering software products and services in large enterprises and small startups Practicing Scrum and XP for nearly a decade Speaker at Agile gatherings Producer, co- host of The Agile Coach podcast Blogs at michaeljtardiff.com & Feeling- Agile.com mtardiff@solutionsiq.com

4 Advice for a beginning ScrumMaster?

5 Stuff that works.

6 Stuff Approaches that works.

7 Approaches that I've seen work.

8 And a technique.

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10 Believe in the framework.

11 Believe in the team.

12 Leave space.

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14 (like that one...)

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16 Listen, watch, and offer what you hear and see.

17 Help the team get and use space.

18 Help the team's workspace tell the story of what they're doing and have done.

19 Use that workspace along with every chance you get to tell the team's story to anyone and everyone.

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24 Advice from Ben Gray Offered at AgilePDX, April 2011

25 Be the change you wish to see in your organization.

26 I don't tell people stuff I don't know. Pete Turner, Zen ScrumMaster

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28 One more thing...

29 The Technique

30 We gathered tips...using Affinity Grouping at Agilepalooza...and AgilePDX...and the Scrum Gathering To see the text of these tips and additions, visit michaeljtardiff.com

31 [What we did in Seattle. And Santa Clara. And Portland. And Seattle again.] [From twenty to sixty people usedthe technique described in the next slides to discover and collect the tips, approaches, or questions they had on the subject of the talk.]

32 We gathered tips......using affinity grouping and dot voting at Agilepalooza Seattle To see the text of these tips, questions, and ideas, visit michaeljtardiff.com

33 Make sure stories are the right size for your sprint time box. Serving is not fixing. Servant leader: help team to be their best, not make the team anything. Tracking dependencies. Communicate, communicate, communicate... Burn-up charts Scope tasks into small well-defined units. Use named magnets for what people are currently working on. Do not over-analyze. Focus on the story, tasks; don't just talk about stuff you did. Write the task name at the bottom of the sticky (so you can overlap stickies and still read them). Ask team about value to end user. Don't rathole. Listen to team. Referee disputes. Ask about stucks and stops. Use time to encourage participation. Believe that it will work even against all odds.

34 Stop working 70-hour weeks. Help people help you!! Educate where necessary!! Acknowledge team members for the work accomplished in each sprint. Testing is everyone's responsibility. Remove roadblocks. Daily standups. Take the role of removing impediments seriously. Include *all* Product Backlog including items not fully spec'd. Get buy-in from Product Owner. "Planning Poker" -- done by team members. Get clarity from Product Owner. Define what the objective is. Define the goal of the sprint. Know when to step back. Get Product Owner at the meetings. Raise issue cross-functionally. Don't work on things that aren't tasks. Know what "done" means. When doing Planning Poker, detail-oriented people can get hung up debating between a value of 4 to 6 much faster than small to medium Involve the whole team in planning

35 ...and questions. What does the ScrumMaster do when the team says they are doing fine but Rally shows they aren't? What can you do when team members only "go through the motions" but don't *really* follow Scrum practices? Does ScrumMaster report progress to Product Owner and Technical Manager? Where did the name come from? What is a Scrum? How does ScrumMaster manage in distributed environment? How to build cross-functional discipline. How technical does a ScrumMaster need to be? What is an easy first step to move from Project Manager to ScrumMaster? What to do when expected criticism was not written down. Systemic thinking? Who gathers requirements?

36 How?

37 Thinking in a group. (or practical brainstorming )

38 Thinking in a group. Extracting ideas/input from a team is slow and focuses attention on one member of the team at a time (the one proving the input at that moment) and on the ScrumMaster. How do we "go fast" and work as a team to decide what we want and need to do, while gathering ideas from everyone?

39 Using affinity grouping. (sometimes called silent grouping )

40 Affinity grouping. Focus on the team and teamwork by using sticky notes and bold ink markers to have all team members simultaneously produce ideas and input, putting them up on a wall or whiteboard as soon as they're written. When the flow of notes to the wall stops, then......ask the team to "swarm" the wall, all at once arranging the stickies into groups of similar or related topics, labeling those groupings when it becomes apparent what the common theme is.

41 Using dot voting.

42 Dot voting. Affinity grouping rapidly produces more items than a team can likely focus on in a sprint or planning meeting or retrospective. So use "dot-voting" to determine the sense of the whole team. Take the approximate square root of the number of stickies, and give each team member that number of sticky dots (the removable type are great).

43 ...and dot deciding.

44 Dot deciding. Each team member can use their dots as they wish to indicate the items they think should be discussed/ explored/acted upon: Use as many of your dots as you like. Put more than one dot on the same item. Move your dots when you see how others have dot-voted. When activity subsides, facilitator identifies items with most dots and focuses team on those.

45 Want to see them? For the previous (and maybe your) tips, ideas, and questions, visit michaeljtardiff.com

46 More techniques. Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, by Diana Larsen and Esther Derby ScrumMasterʼs Checklist from Michael James

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48 @mjt michaeljtardiff.com

49 Presented at finer gatherings near you Agilepalooza Seattle & Santa Clara 2010 AgilePDX April 2011 Scrum Global Gathering Seattle May 2011 Available for your group or bar mitzvah Additional info and updates available at michaeljtardiff.com Copyright 2010, 2011 Michael J. Tardiff