Cross Skilling is starting to happen and already there are fewer bottlenecks. John is starting to have more time to step back from the day to day and look at the big picture. He’s heard that most Scrum teams become more productive over time and he wonders how is team is doing. He pulls up the CFD for the current release:

and immediately notices that the rate at which stories are being selected has slowed down in the past few sprints. Historically the team has a trailing average of 30 story points a sprint. In the past few sprints they’ve only achieved 25 and 22. Is this drop meaningful? Is it related to the team’s cross skilling efforts? John decides to ask the team what is going on. He writes a short note, describing the problem he’s seen (without his own suspicions) and asks the team to reflect on the discovery. After Daily Scrum John invites the team members to talk about the problems they see:

• Cross Skilling has slowed the team to a small extent
• Interruptions are down, so if anything the team should be more productive
• Unit Tests aren’t getting written for very often
• Ian and Doug report that they’ve spent a fair amount of time in the past few sprints implementing a new story only to find it broke an existing story.
• Its also noted that there are several places in the code that have become rather hairy and are difficult to change safely.

Read More…

Its day four of the sprint and ScrumMaster John is studying the Story + Task wall to see how the sprint is progressing. After a few minutes he sees three things that standout:

1. Martin the only team member who knows how to make changes to the database has his name on four tasks that are in progress. Two of those tasks are blocking the remaining work on their respective stories.
2. Ian the business logic developer has his name on three tasks, two of which are blocked by Martin. The other task is blocking continued work on another story.
3. There are six stories in progress even though the team has previously agreed on a WIP (Work In Progress) limit of 3 stories in progress at one time.

Analysis

The team is currently blocked on Martin’s database related tasks. However even if that bottleneck were resolved they would still be blocked on Ian’s tasks.

The team isn’t respecting its own WIP limits. Read More…

This episode has been brought to you by a quick trip to California.

Tom Stafford wrote about his use of Psychology to avoid Bystander Apathy. Interesting his approach point to a specific person (or persons) and tell them exactly what to do has been standard training for first aiders for years.

Sharp Brains had an excellent series “Under­stand­ing the Human Brain and How It Responds to Stress”:

• Octo­ber 17th: The Human Brain and How it Responds to Stress
• Octo­ber 24th: Grey Mat­ters
• Octo­ber 31st: The Lit­tle Brain Down Under
• Novem­ber 7th: Stress Response Explained
• Novem­ber 14th: The Human Brain Likes Balance

Study Hacks described a study of elite vs average violin players. The difference in their practice wasn’t their dedication, on average they spent the same amount of time – it was how they practiced. Elite players spent time stretching their skills, pushing their boundaries and practicing the uncomfortable. In addition elite players consolidated their practice into well defined blocks (two a day) vs. the average who spread their practice through out the day.

Stephanie West Allen shares evidence that SWOT analysis may lead us to dead ends.

Garth Sundem suggests that “Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong”. In an interview with Robert Bjork it is suggested our learning model of attempting to master one skill before moving onto the next might be completely wrong.

In a New York Times article: “The Rise of the New Groupthink” this week Susan Cain claims that teams and collaborative work give rise to groupthink. Groupthink is not out of the question, as Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons demonstrate in “The Invisible Gorilla” group think is a risk – cite the example of the Georgian War in 2008:

When Mikheil Saakashvili was elected president of Georgia in 2004. he was only thirty —six years old. He stocked the government with loyal ministers who were also in their thirties and lacked military experience but sympathized with their leader’s views about the importance of reclaiming the breakaway regions from Russian influence. Over the next four years they managed to convince themselves that it was a good idea to fight an army that outnumbered theirs by twenty five to one. It’s not hard to imagine how a group of like—minded government officials could take a set of opinions that none of them held with great confidence individually and aggregate them, by deliberating among themselves and reinforcing one another’s public statements, into a high-confidence conclusion.

Read More…

Part of an ongoing series called Scrum Master Tales. The series covers ScrumMaster John and his team as they develop an online bookstore.

Last time we read about our team they were suffering from a very high rate of interruptions after the product had gone live: The Story of Production Support.

After another couple of sprints using the one “person off” strategy the production support problem wasn’t completely fixed but the team was starting to spend less time on support. However John started to notice a new problem, even though production support wasn’t the primary cause there were still alot of interruptions, he still noticed that team members were being interrupted (a mix of drop by, phone calls and email).

John spent the next few days just taking notes on the interruptions. Discounting friends dropping by for coffee or smokes and calls on personal phones (presumably family or friends), he could still see that his team members were being bothered 2-3 times a day. Taking the best notes he could without outright spying on people, some of the interruptions were obvious:

• a couple of people called Martin every time there was a database problem (big or small)
• team members attended meetings (corporate, HR, …) sometimes more than one
• Tonia (the world’s best Agile Tester) has become a focus for Agile testing questions with people stopping by her desk 2-3 times a day to ask questions about Agile testing.

To track these issues John didn’t need to spy, he just watched the flow of people in and out of the team space, listened for phone calls and read the email trail that filled his inbox.

Once John noticed the issue he mentioned into a standup and asked people to start tracking what sort of interruptions they had. In the retrospective the team discussed sources of interruptions (again using a timeline as reminder). Read More…

At Agile2011 Kevlin Henney provactively suggested that we don’t learn from mistakes (see: Why we don’t learn from our mistakes, The Optimism Bias), suggesting that we learn more from our successes. This seems to against the core agile principle that we learn from our mistakes (i.e. my motto “Fail Fast” etc). It also seemed to contradict the message in Linda Rising’s keynote that followed Kevlin. This makes me very happy to have seen a pair of articles in the past few days that bridge the gap: How Your Brain Reacts to Mistakes Depends On Your Mindset (a short summary from Science Daily) and Why Do Some People Learn Faster? (a longer item from Jonah Lehrer that ties several ideas together). The upshot both Kevlin and Linda were right. We do learn from our mistakes but not everyone has the mindset to do it.

Read More…

When we left John and the team they were just getting the shipping features ready and were waiting to go live with the site. This turns out to be a blessing and a curse. Its a blessing because the business is making money, a curse because with it come support issues.

John spends some of his time and energy just watching the team and their flow everyday. In the first two sprints after the release the team struggles and fails to meet its planning commitments. At first he’s ok and just says its the inevitable post release hiccups (I don’t agree with John on this one, its not inevitable I think it was a first warning sign – ed), but when its clear that its continuing into the 3rd sprint he starts to get worried. John notices that team members are being interrupted often several times a day. Most of the interruptions are support issues.

Read More…

Caveat – given the way I’m writing this series occasionally things will happen out of order, i.e. I will be reminded of points I wish I had made earlier.

John, Sue and the rest of the team have started another sprint this time they committed to fewer stories and part way through the sprint are well on the way to getting stories completed. This time they committed to 8 stories with sizes ranging from 2 – 8 points. Every couple of days they get a story accepted. Things are going awesomely well.

Story

• As a Canadian book buyer I want to Amazon to ship my book to Canada so I can get my book home – Story Points: 8
• As a Canadian book buyer I want to Amazon to calculate the import duty on my books – Story Points: 3
• As a Canadian book buyer living in Ontario I want Amazon to calculate the local sales tax (HST) – Story Points: 2
• …

Read More…

Last time we met John (ScrumMaster) and the team, they had just discovered that their backlog had many large stories and no-estimates. The team delayed the start of their first sprint, did some Product Backlog Grooming. When we meet them again their first sprint in is in progress.

Story

Coming out of the planning meeting the team committed to five stories totalling 42 Story Points. Their overall Sprint Goal get the customer’s book home:

• As a book buyer I want to add my book to my shopping cart so that I can purchase it – Story Points: 13
• As a book buyer I want to tell Amazon where I want my book shipped to so I can get it – Story Points: 8
• As a book buyer I want to see the price for my books with shipping and tax so I can see whether I’m ok with the price – Story Points: 3
• As a book buyer I want to choose my payment type (MasterCard, Visa, Amex or Paypal) so that I can pay for my book(s) – Story Points: 3
• As a book buyer I want to pay for my book(s) so I can get it home – Story Points: 13
• As a book buyer I want a confirmation message so I can see that the purchase was successful – Story Points: 2

Read More…

You’ve just finished your Scrum Master training and to start exploring some issues we didn’t have time to cover? I spent the afternoon putting together a list of 29 books that I think you will find interesting. As part of the process I decided to experiment with doing the list as a mind map.

Let me know if this was helpful or if there was a key book I missed. In addition give some ideas of how you might have presented this.