Daily Stand-up – 3 questions or not?

Over the years using and implementing Scrum in organisations, I struggled sometimes with the value of the daily-standup…

Why did I struggle?

- The teams started off excited and it worked, however, as the adrenalin rush dissappeared, the daily stand-up became a drag, something they had to do with no excitement and not a lot of communication or team co-ordination

- By asking every member to come to the front and answer the 3 questions, there was no cohesive drive towards completing stories from the top ( prioritised ), people were all over the board and it was difficult to see what is what

- The communication as a team was not good, there was no hype, there was no excitement and no drive towards a mutually accountable goal at all…

The Solution

Well, this may go against the books and theory, however, it works for my teams…

I changed to ‘walking the board’, and a lot of Scrum practitioners are now doing the same…

I asked the team to communicate and co-ordinate collectively on each story, one at a time, from the top ( highest priority ) and talk through each story as a team…

The Result

It worked! I managed to solve 2 problems with this…

Problem 1: No effective communication and co-ordination as a team

Problem 2: Working all over the board, instead of delivering stories as a team from the highest priority first!

By walking-the-board we manage to solve both… the teams are now excited, they communication extremely well, the focus together as a team on their mutually accountable goal and the best is that suddenly they are holding each other accountable for that goal…

Since, I have used this regularly when I encounter the above mentioned problems… walking the board provides a Scrum Master or Coach with a method to mature an Agile team very fast…

Please go to http://agile-commentary.blogspot.com/2009/04/walking-board.html for another Agilist who did the same…

Kind regards

Arrie van der Dussen

Agile Business Manager

Kaizania

agile@kaizania.co.za

Bugs – How do we handle them in an Agile context?

How do we handle bugs?

A question I receive a lot when coaching organisations and teams…

Well, I found this blog post which provides a really good explanation of how Agile teams need to look at bugs…

http://testobsessed.com/2009/03/13/handling-bugs-in-an-agile-context/

Arrie van der Dussen

Agile Business Manager

Kaizania

agile@kaizania.co.za

Agile Forum – Topic: Scrum – silver bullet to success?

Scrum will form the focus of the JCSE’s next Agile Forum. Arrie van der Dussen, from the company Kaizania, is one of South Africa’s foremost authorities on Scrum. He, together with Lionel Bisschoff also from Kaizania, will lead a discussion on what Scrum is. They will introduce Scrum as an Agile Project Management framework. This will be followed by an open Q&A discussion around Scrum.

In the Agile software development community “Scrum” has become a widely adopted methodology. Scrum is defined as a “team-based framework to develop complex systems and products.” Like most of the Agile methods, Scrum is iterative and incremental; it allows teams to deliver a potentially shippable set of functionality every iteration; it provides the agility needed to respond to rapidly changing requirements. What then makes Scrum different? Why should organisations adopt Scrum?

Venue: SAB World of Beer – 15 President Street, Newtown Cultural Precinct (Map)

Date: 06 May 2009

Time: 16:00 to 18:00

Cost: Free

To register for this event, please go to http://www.jcse.org.za/events.php?itemid=52

For any information, please contact agile@kaizania.co.za

Arrie van der Dussen

Agile Business Manager

Kaizania

www.kaizania.co.za

Beer and Barbecue

After Kaizania’s Studio team pulled all the stops to dig themselves out of a sprint hole, we wanted to end off the week with a beer and a braai (for non South African readers, a braai is similar to a barbecue, just much better). The team also decided to take leave together so as to better control leave impact on the project.

Below a pic of the remaining cleanup work done to get the system stable and ready for the next sprint after the team returns from leave. All are determined to retain the smooth rhythm of many, many previous sprints.

Sprint 7.9 - Burn-down Chart

And here a pic of our quick beer and braai before folks went on leave over Easter.

Beer and braai just before the long weekend!

Thanks to our customer for funding the braai, much appreciated by all at Kaizania.

That’s all folks.

Keep scrumming

Lionel Bisschoff

CEO

Kaizania IT Services

Good Product Owners are too rare

The past few years while using Scrum and helping organisations adopt Agile and Implement Scrum the case for Good Product Owners became clear…

Let’s be honest, it’s not that difficult to implement Scrum within any organisation at all, it’s difficult to bring all that’s needed together for any Scrum implementation to show the expected success organisations so badly wants to see.

One of the key roles to any Agile adoption and Scrum implementation must be a good Product Owner, yet this is where things usually struggle to get forward momentum or sometimes the lack of a good Product Owner make the whole implementation fail. Who’s blamed then, well, most of the time, Scrum!

Why blame Scrum? Scrum is just a process, a framework and a very lightweight framework. That said, the reason, and the only reason why that organisation knew that they were failing was most probably because Scrum showed them that they are running the risk of failing. The only thing that organisation managed to overlooked was what Scrum was trying desperately to tell them, that their role of Product Owner was failing! If only we listen when Scrum speaks to us! Yet, the era of the blame game is not over yet, we have some way to go, we are still searching to feel comfortable and protected by placing blame on process, frameworks etc, instead of having the courage to face up to what is standing in our way of moving forward…

So, that out of the way, let’s look at the role of Product Owner then…

A good Agile Product Owner

·         must be responsible for the success of the project the team delivers.

·         has to make business decisions, about what is important to him and how much it is important in comparison to other requirements he may have.

·         must provides the vision about the product for the team.

·         provides the team with user stories and needs deep domain knowledge to do that.

·         has prime responsibility to validate the deliverables the team produces. Do they meet his quality requirements? Are all conditions of satisfaction met?

·         has to provide timely feedback to the development team, when questions arise.

·         has to be able to make decisions on the spot, to resolve questions on how to proceed.

·         needs to be in constant communication with the team and other stakeholder or project sponsors

·         has to keep the financial situation of the project under close scrutiny

Author: Jiri Lundak

Being able to do all the above, a good Agile Product Owner must surely have the following skills and attributes then…

·         the ability to communicate effectively on all levels

·         good business sense

·         technical foundation and

·         trust

Given this, does your Product Owner fulfil these criteria or is it that organisations don’t have the courage to get the right person to fulfil this role, do they just take traditional roles to fulfil this crucial role without realising the consequence?

Agile adoption and specifically Scrum implementations lack the forward momentum expected or fail most of the time because of the lack of a Good Agile Product Owner, not because Agile or Scrum or Lean or XP. Those are just processes and frameworks, it’s still the quality of person and teams making the world go round!

Work hard at your Product Owner role and your road to Agile success will be much easier! Your Product Owner must be by far the most important person for any Agile team!

For Agile Product Owner training, please visit the Kaizania Agile Training section…

Arrie van der Dussen

Agile Business Manager

Kaizania