Scrumology - Latest Comments

Re: Is Your Product Owner Missing In Action?

Bachan — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:11:29 -0000

Would be of great interest to know someone who attempted this approach.

Re: The Daily Standup Trap

Bachan — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 23:53:49 -0000

Great post David, we precise and has lot of valuable information. I never thought about the virtual pairing , great idea.

Another way to get distributed team engaged is to effectively communicate the vision and goal of the product to team members who are not co located with the PO. In my opinion this makes the team members align with the purpose and vision of the product.

Re: A Mirror for the Team

Tonyaskew1 — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 08:45:48 -0000

Excellent read.
I believe that sometimes the SM get's so involved in the scrum process that they often forget about observing the teams behavior. However, this comes with experience. Newer SM's are usually very caught up in the mechanics of scrum and haven't yet developed the patience to let scrum do its own work.

Re: A Mirror for the Team

David J Bland — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:36:11 -0000

I suppose I take a more direct approach, but I do understand where you are coming from. I'm rather patient, but not enough so that I'll wait until the next retrospective to bring up past commitments again.

To some extent it's a balancing act, because I don't want to disrupt the flow but at the same time the team needs to be held accountable sooner rather than later.

Re: A Mirror for the Team

Ilja Preuß — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:30:35 -0000

I agree that the SM is the mirror of the team. If I notice that some agreement isn't met, I wouldn't immediately jump to proposing solutions, though. First I would ask the team whether I understood the agreement correctly, and whether they still want to keep it. And if so, what they want to do about it.

Re: The Daily Standup Trap

Prashant Pathak — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:42:47 -0000

Great post David ! I believe it really helps to be Story/task centric rather than people centric.

Re: Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated

Gagnesh Kumar — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 04:18:39 -0000

As long as the team is mature and understands the real purpose behind using these terms, it should be OK. We should not take these terms literally but try to understand the gist. 'Single Wringable Neck, or One Throat to Choke' means that buck needs to stop somewhere and someone has to take the bottomline or we will end up building something that noone wants. All stakeholders in agile have to contribute but Product Owner has to dictate on what he'she really wants and hence he/she has to be 'committed'.

Re: Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated

Coheocha — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:11:38 -0000

I think a sprint is reasonable - a period when the team can look straight ahead a focus on acheiving a defined stable goal. Trouble is, scrum calls for the end of each sprint to be followed immediatly by another. In a FTE position, there is far too much 'off-project stuff' going on to focus just on the project all the time. company communication meetings, security training, mentoring, performance appraisel, etc, etc. Wouldn't it be better to sprint for a while, then stop and do all this other stuff, then sprint again. Has anyone experienced an approach like this - I've found it hard to justify to senior management baying for features - ....

Re: Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated

Nigel shaw. — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 20:14:29 -0000

I agree. Sprint is ridiculous. The sooner we go back to iteration the better.

Re: Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated

Nigel Shaw — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 20:12:13 -0000

I couldn't agree more.

Re: Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated

Tonyaskew1 — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:54:53 -0000

I've never been a fan of the pig and chicken labels. As it's been stated it lacks professionalism. IMO the last thing you need to be challenged with when implementing scrum in a new and skeptical environment is explaining that symbolism. Glad to know I’m not the only one who thinks it needs changing…

Re: 10 More Agile Gurus to Follow on Twitter

David J Bland — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:18:36 -0000

Glad I could help!

Re: 10 More Agile Gurus to Follow on Twitter

Samantha Laing — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 03:28:55 -0000

Thank you - being tucked away in sunny South Africa, twitter is just about the only way I get to interact with Agile fanatics around the world :)

Re: 10 More Agile Gurus to Follow on Twitter

Samantha Laing — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 03:27:58 -0000

Thank You :)

Re: Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated

Angie — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:28:15 -0000

Right on David. I have always hated the chicken and pig joke.

Re: Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated

David J Bland — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:02:28 -0000

Funny that you mention this, as I was dinged only last week on this exact topic.

Old habits die hard, and instead of Iteration I said Sprint during our Stand Up. One of the team members stated that a Sprint was not sustainable.

I agree with your comments, and it's a term that I plan on using less & less going forward.

Re: Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated

Chuck_vdL — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:56:03 -0000

Can we add "Sprint" to the list of terms to depricate. A sprint is not a pace which is sustainable, no-runner can do sprint after sprint after sprint with no rests inbetween. This seems to be a phrase that was designed to convence managment that the team would be 'working as hard as they possibly can' which frankly if you are going to have a sustained pace, cannot be the case.

Call it Iteration, or Cycle, but not Sprint.

Re: How to Create a Virtual Story Wall in Google Docs

David J Bland — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:27:22 -0000

No problem Danie, I remember us chatting about low cost scrum / agile tools last year and this is about as low cost as it gets (free)

Re: How to Create a Virtual Story Wall in Google Docs

David J Bland — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:26:34 -0000

Oh hmm, don't tell them that! :)

Re: Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated

David J Bland — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:10:23 -0000

Agreed on rhetoric.

Disagree on certification, or at least some of it.

I think we can do a better job as a community in not pushing people off a cliff after certification or building them up in such a way where they have unrealistic expectations.

I feel as though this especially rings true with Distributed Scrum. The courses I've seen / been to have only scratched the surface on it . It's as if you are expected you to make the leap between learning Scrum concepts as applied to collocated teams and just making them work for Distributed Scrum.

Quite the undertaking in my opinion.

Re: Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated

Scott Ambler — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 07:32:39 -0000

Deprecating the questionable rhetoric (chicken & pig and wringable necks are rhetoric issues, not terminology issues) would be a good start.

Dealing with the mounting integrity debt resulting from the certification scheme would be an even better thing to do, but I suspect too many people are making too much money for this to be a viable consideration. Meaningless certification is causing significant harm to this community.

Re: Sizing Up the Enterprise

Manoj Vadakkan — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:30:41 -0000

Hi David,
I agree. usually the PMO/PPQA wants to standardize these things. Last week, I was in a same situation. I was very appreciative of the fact that they were buying into the concept of estimating in story points. But then I had to put some breaks on and say - we are not there yet ( to come up with standard story points) . My advice was to have a few teams try out this approach of user stories and story points. Let’s get mature in estimating. After a while we will talk again about the need for standardizing and if so how to do it.

Re: Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated

David J Bland — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:40:23 -0000

I found that ScrumMaster (sans-space) & Scrum Master (with space) are used interchangeably. In fact in doing my SM salary research the sans-space one made 3$k less a year :)

My business card is sans-space, however I'm less worked up over the names and more about the divisive terms we use for introducing people to Scrum.

Not everyone will agree with me on that, in fact I'm quite certain Ken Schwaber will take the opposite view! (That's ok, as i do not speak for the SA or Scrum.org here)

I'm not lobbying that we throw away all of the terminology, but merely deprecate the bits that I feel work against self organizing, cross functional teams.

Re: Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated

Ben Mathews — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:10:43 -0000

I agree. In fact, Scrum, ScrumMaster (why no space!) etc sound a bit gimmicky which can actually hinder getting buy in.

I particularly dislike 'Backlog' since that has some really negative connotations, particularly since we should be looking at it more as a set of options than a clogged pipe of stuff we're trying to clear.

Re: How to Create a Virtual Story Wall in Google Docs

Danie_deleon — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:52:29 -0000

Thanks David, this is a useful tool for small companies wanting to try this out without having to purchase something that's not in the budget.