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The Sprint duration should be short enough in order to keep the team focused and also, to keep the business risk acceptable to the Product Owner. Ideally, the sprint length can be short enough to be able to synchronize the development work with other business events. The Scrum guide limits the Sprint length to 1 month but there is no official lower limit. So, 1 week can be often accepted as the shortest sprint duration. So, you can find the length that is best for your team in between 1 week - 1 month.
The Daily Scrum is for the people transforming the Product Backlog items into an Increment. Only the people that are building the product should be present at the Daily Scrum. The Scrum Master enforces the rule that only Development Team members participate in the Daily Scrum to share information with each other that can help them to understand how to organize the work among the team members in a better way to meet the Sprint Goal.
There is no such thing as Sprint 0. It is not a valid Sprint from Scrum timeboxed events. "Sprint 0" has become a phrase misused to describe the planning that occurs prior to the first sprint like refining product backlog, architecture envisioning, prioritizing and release planning etc. This term is confused with the term "Release 0". It is ideal to talk about Release 0 as opposed to Sprint 0
The development team can participate in the product backlog refinement anytime during the sprint. Product Backlog refinement is a continuous process in which the development team and the product owner collaborate anytime needed during the Sprint on the details of Product Backlog items. PBR is required in each and every Sprint to refine items to be ready for future Sprints. The Scrum team decides when and how refinement is done.
The Development Team and the Product Owner are responsible for product backlog refinement. During a product backlog refinement meeting, the product owner and the development team communicate and decide the top items on the product backlog. The team can raise queries during the sprint planning session if they find any unresolved issue. The Product Owner and team can discuss with the Stakeholders to find out “what” they want and “why” they want. Once if they are clear with the user needs then they can go for the cross-checking with teams.
Deliver an increment of releasable software, and develop and deliver at least one piece of functionality. The heart of Scrum is a Sprint, a time-box of one month or less during which a "Done", useable, and potentially releasable product Increment is created. This applies to every Sprint. The first Sprint conducted by the development team plays a key role in the Scrum. It also focuses on estimating the availability of the team, selecting the items from the product backlog, and final thoughts. During the first sprint, the development team delivers an increment of releasable software. They also Develop and deliver at least one piece of functionality.
The next sprint begins immediately after the conclusion of the previous Sprint. A sprint begins with Sprint planning meeting and concludes with Sprint Retro. In general, planning for the subsequent Sprint starts after the conclusion of the previous sprint. So, typically the plan for the next Sprint is fixed by the time the previous sprint ends. The actions from the retrospective and demo will go in the product backlog and can be prioritized in a future sprint.
This is the task of the Product Owner. The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog, which includes that the Product Backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to all, and shows what the Scrum Team will work on next. The responsibility of achieving maximum business value for the project lies primarily with the Product Owner. The PO is also responsible for maintaining business justification for the project and articulating customer requirements. A PO represents the voice of the customer.
The Development Team is responsible for managing the progress of work during a Sprint. The Development team is comprised of professionals who work in a Sprint and deliver a potentially releasable product at the end of each Sprint. These increments are created by only the members of the Development team. The Development Team uses the Daily Scrum to inspect a progress toward the Sprint Goal and to inspect how progress is trending towards completing the work in the Sprint Backlog.
The Scrum Master arranges the Scrum meeting for the Development team. The Development team is the main player of the meeting.But, the Scrum Master guides the Development Team to keep the Daily Scrum within the 15-minute time-box. The Scrum Master enforces the rule that only the Development Team members participate in the Daily Scrum.
Inspection, Transparency, Adaptation. Scrum is founded on empirical process control theory or empiricism. Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known. The three pillars uphold every implementation of empirical process control are transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
The Product Owner actively asks for stakeholder’s input and expectations to process into the Product Backlog. The Product Owner represents the Stakeholders to the Scrum Team, which includes representing their desired requirements in the form of Product Backlog. The Product Owner has the final call over the Product Backlog.
As much as told by the Product Owner, will be done for every Product Backlog item it selects in conformance with the definition of done. The purpose of each Sprint is to deliver Increments of potentially releasable functionality that adhere to the Scrum Team's current definition of "Done". To determine the progress and the next sprint item, Scrum teams do the Sprint Planning. During the Sprint Planning, the Product Owner and Development team agree on a sprint goal and define the goals to carry out in the upcoming sprint.
Scrum is a framework within which complex products in complex environments are developed. Scrum is not a process or a technique for building products; rather, it is a framework within which you can employ various processes and techniques. Scrum Framework is applied to the complex projects in the complex environments. If a Scrum team adheres to the Scrum practices, it will help in developing the best quality product within a specified timeframe.
During a sprint retrospective, the Scrum Master acts as a peer team member. The Scrum Master acts as a facilitator for the team. The role of the Scrum Master in the Sprint Retrospective is to facilitate the self-organized Scrum teams to resolve their issues. Sprint Retrospective is all about discussing what went well and what can be improved in the next Sprint. The Scrum Master facilitates the teams and works as a peer team member to speed up the project processes.
The length of a daily Scrum is fixed at 15 minutes for the development team to a create plan for the next 24 hours and synchronize activities, it does not change with the length of a Sprint. This optimizes team performance and collaboration by analyzing the work since the last Daily Scrum and predicting the forthcoming Sprint work. This Daily Scrum meeting is conducted at the same place and time each day to minimize complexity.
Ideally, it is 3-9. Scrum says team size of 6+ or -3 is the Scrum guide recommendation. Optimal Development Team size is small enough to remain nimble and large enough to complete significant work. Fewer than three Development Team members decrease interaction and results in smaller productivity gains. More than nine members simply require too much coordination.
Development team, product owner, scrum master. The Scrum Team consists of a Product Owner, the Development Team, and a Scrum Master. As the Scrum teams are cross-functional, the development team includes designers, ops engineers, and testers in addition to developers. Each of the Scrum roles has defined a set of responsibilities and they can complete a project successfully only if they accomplish these responsibilities, closely work and interact together.
The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the Development Team. He/she is the voice of the customer. PO determines the scope of a product and release dates. The PO can attend all the meetings to keep track of the team’s progress. If there are any changes that need to be done, it will be implemented immediately. The product owner wishes that the team will be able to achieve its goal with the timetable.
When the timebox expires.The duration of a Sprint is fixed and cannot be shortened or lengthened. For example, if all the items of a Sprint are not done, the Sprint is still marked as over and the remaining items are moved to the product backlog from where it can be scheduled to any of the following sprint based on the revised priority. Similarly, if all the items of a Sprint are done before time, the dev team is free to pick top PBIs and start working on it.
It is when the Scrum Team and stakeholders inspect the outcome of a Sprint and figure out what to do next.Every event in Scrum, besides the Sprint which is a container for the other events, is an opportunity to Inspect and Adapt. A Sprint Review is conducted at the end of the Sprint to inspect the increment and adapt the product backlog if required. During this, the Scrum Team and Stakeholders collaborate about what was done in the Sprint and figure out any changes to be done to the product backlog during the Sprint to optimize value.
Whatever is deemed most appropriate by the Product Owner.The Product Owner decides what makes the most sense to optimize the value of the work being done by the Development Team. The product backlog is ordered based on the value provided to the business. The value may be affected by various other factors like complexity, criticality, and risk but are not the direct basis for calculating the value. The item value being delivered is calculated by the product owner and he/she is responsible for ordering the product backlog.
The consistency reduces complexity.The purpose of the Daily Scrum meeting is to carry out a communication between the team members. The Scrum meeting is timeboxed to 15 minutes irrespective of the team-size and is held at the same time and place each day to reduce complexity. Also, it is usually held at the morning time when maximum team members gather to plan work for the day.
The ability to turn the Product Backlog items it selects into an increment of potentially releasable product functionality. The Development Team consists of professionals who do the work of delivering a potentially releasable Increment of "Done" product at the end of each Sprint. The Development Teams are cross-functional teams, with all of the necessary skills as a team to create a product Increment.
To support the Product Owner with insights and information into high-value product and system capabilities and to support the Scrum Master to cause organizational change that fosters empiricism, self-organization, bottom-up intelligence, and intelligent release of the software. Management has no active role in the actual product development through Scrum. However, management external to the Scrum team is incredibly important in setting the vision and strategy to guide the overall process to the team for developing a product in the organization.
It means the event can take no more than a maximum amount of time. Time-boxed events are events that have a maximum defined duration. For Example- Daily Scrum meeting is one of the timeboxed ceremonies in the Scrum. This event is timeboxed for 15 minutes (not more than that) and usually held at the same time and place each day. Also, it is usually held at the morning time when maximum team members gather to plan work for the whole day.
The Product Owner. The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog. The PO prioritizes the product backlog during the Sprint Planning meeting for the team members. The PO keeps a vision of the product to build and convey that vision to the Scrum team. Also, the role of the PO is to motivate the team towards achieving a project goal.
8 hours for a monthly Sprint. For shorter Sprints, it is usually shorter. Each Sprint begins with the Sprint Planning meeting. Sprint Planning is time-boxed to a maximum of eight hours for a one-month Sprint. For shorter Sprints, the event is usually shorter. For example- for a two-week sprint, the Sprint Planning meeting can be of 4-hours.
As needed, while taking into account a short-term reduction in Productivity. Teams typically go through some steps before achieving a state of increased performance. Changing membership typically reduces cohesion, affecting the performance and productivity in the short term.
No. Scrum does not have a defined role called “project manager”. A Scrum Team has a Scrum Master, a Product Owner, and a Development Team. As a whole, they have all the controls needed. The project manager role doesn’t exist in a Scrum environment, but the core responsibilities of a project manager do exist like the responsibility of date, scope, budget etc. Many of the responsibilities of a traditional project manager are fulfilled by these roles. So, there is no specific role called project manager when using Scrum.
The primary purpose of a Sprint is to produce a done increment of working product. The heart of Scrum is a Sprint, a time-box of one month or less during which a "Done", usable, and potentially releasable product Increment is created. The more “Done” the increment is, the more useful the feedback that is gathered will be. If something is 99% done, and only 1% work is remaining - it is still NOT DONE, and it has to be added back to the product backlog and re-estimated during the next sprint.
A Scrum Master does not have to be there; he or she only has to ensure the Development Team has a Daily Scrum. The Scrum Master enforces the rule that only Development Team members participate in the Daily Scrum. Although the Scrum Master or Product Owner can attend this meeting to facilitate the Daily Scrum, this is certainly not required by Scrum. The Development Team members synchronize their work, monitor their progress toward the Sprint Goal and if required they adapt the Sprint Backlog and the plan for the next 24 hours during the Daily Scrum.
By facilitating Development Team decisions and by removing impediments that hinder the Development Team. A Scrum Master is a servant-leader for the Development Team. Facilitation and removing impediments serves a team in achieving the best productivity possible. The Scrum Master within the Scrum Team facilitates the development of working software and help the development team in delivering the Product Increment. The Scrum Master does everything possible to help the development team to work at their highest level.
4 hours for a monthly Sprint. For shorter Sprints, it is usually shorter. Sprint Review is a four-hour time-boxed meeting for one-month Sprints. For shorter Sprints, the event is usually shorter.
Sprint Review is held at the end of each sprint. The scrum team shows what they achieved during the sprint in the retrospective meeting. Typically, the sprint review should not take more than one hour per week of sprint duration. It means a 30-day sprint would result in four-hour time-boxed sprint review. Similarly, two-hour review for two weeks sprint. Finally, the length of your sprint review depends on the length of your sprint.
They collaborate often so the Product Owner can make informed decisions in balancing effort and value of Product Backlog items. They also collaborate so the Development Team builds Increments keeping end-user and the Stakeholder concerns in mind. The Product owner clearly expresses Product Backlog items, ensuring the Development Team understands items in the Product Backlog to the level needed for developing them and creating the value the Product Owner envisions. The scope may be re-negotiated if the effort grows much higher than anticipated.
The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product. The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog. The PO prioritizes the product backlog during the Sprint Planning meeting for the team members. The PO keeps a vision of the product to build and convey that vision to the Scrum team. Also, the role of the PO is to motivate the team towards achieving a project goal.
The Product Backlog is an ordered list of everything that might be needed in the product and is the single source of requirements for any changes to be made to the product. It is a living artifact of product requirements that exists and evolves as long as a product exists. The Product Backlog evolves as the product and the environment in which it will be used evolves. Higher ordered Product Backlog items are usually clearer and more detailed than lower ordered ones. As long as a product exists, its Product Backlog also exists.
The Product Owner creates and sustains a product backlog that maximizes value and represents the needs of the stakeholders. The PO is also responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the Development Team. The primary tool to do so is the Product Backlog. The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog. The PO prioritizes the product backlog during the Sprint Planning meeting for the team members. The PO keeps a vision of the product to build and convey that vision to the Scrum team. Also, the role of the PO is to motivate the team towards achieving a project goal.
Through the frequent delivery of Increments of the product into the market. The Product Owner manages Product Backlog against the assumption that value will be generated. This assumption remains invalidated when not checked against users and market. When a Sprint's horizon is too long, you increase the risk that what is being developed may no longer be desired. Sprints limit risk to one calendar month or less of work.
Technical debt causes a greater percentage of the product's budget to be spent on maintenance of the product.The velocity at which new functionality can be created is reduced when you have technical debt.
Within the Sprint, the Development Team makes the best decisions possible to assure progress toward the Sprint Goal, realigning with the Product Owner once he/she is available again. In a permanent state of unavailability, a new Product Owner needs to be appointed. Development efforts without a Product Owner are not employing Scrum.
Yes, it can start. The first Sprint requires no more than a Product Owner, a team, and enough ideas to potentially complete a full Sprint. It is not mandatory that the Product Owner should be ready with the complete and exhaustive Product Backlog for starting a first Sprint.
The Development Team. As a collective, they have a complete view of the work needed to transform Product Backlog items into Increments of product. The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog. The PO prioritizes the product backlog during the Sprint Planning meeting for the team members. But, it is the Development Team who is responsible for all the estimates. The people who perform the tasks make the final estimate.
At any time when done by the Product Owner or at the Product Owner's discretion. The Product Backlog is dynamic; it constantly changes to identify what the product needs in order to be appropriate, competitive, and useful. Product Backlog items can be updated at any time by the Product Owner or at the Product Owner's discretion.
Based on the value of the items. Scrum Guide uses the term ‘ordered’ instead of ‘prioritized’ for the Product Backlog. The Product Backlog Items are ordered based on the value of the items. For this, the Development team discusses the PBI ordering with the Product Owner. In the end, the Development team has to has to order the items according to their relative importance to each other.
Yes. The Scrum guide recommends that the development team size should be between 3 and 9. We can change the team members as needed while taking into account the short-term reduction in productivity. If we add more team members according to the project requirements or if we subtract the team members, in the end, the Development team has to meet the Sprint goal.
As much as needs to be Done based on the definition of Done. The Sprint Backlog consists of a set of items that deliver the product increment. It is the Development team members that decide what functionality should be included in the next increment. The Scrum Team defines “Done” at the end of the project and would not consider that the end-product is completed unless it matches with the definition of “Done”.
Yes. The Development Team should be cross-functional, capable of completing the Sprint Backlog items based on the definition of “Done”. Not every kind of delivery is acceptable in Scrum, it should be “potentially releasable Increments of the final product of the project”, to help the stakeholders to give feedback
At the end of each Sprint, a Sprint Review meeting is held. During the Sprint Review meeting, the Scrum team shows what they yielded during the sprint. This meeting is for the Scrum Team and Stakeholders to inspect the outcome of the Sprint and figure out what to do in the next Sprint. Typically, this meeting is a form of the demo of the new features.
Peer team member. The Sprint Retrospective provides an opportunity to inspect and adapt the progress for improvements. The Scrum Master plays the role of a facilitator for his/her team. In the Scrum framework, the teams are self-organized and open to making changes very quickly wherever needed.
There are five time-boxed events in Scrum: Sprint, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective, and Daily Scrum. The Scrum Backlog consists of a list of all the things that need to be done within the project. The Scrum Backlog is maintained all the way through the project.
3 hours. The duration of the Sprint Retrospective meeting varies depending on the sprint length. For a one-week sprint, the meeting should last about one hour; for a two-week sprint, two hours. Teams running four-week sprints should allow three hours for this meeting. Sprint Retrospective is a time-box of 3 hours for a one month Sprint. It’s usually shorter when the Sprints are set shorter.
The main responsibility of the Product Owner is maximizing the value of the project by creating, clearing, and ordering the Product Backlog. The Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog. The PO prioritizes the product backlog during the Sprint Planning meeting for the team members. The PO keeps a vision of the product to build and convey that vision to the Scrum team. Also, the role of the PO is to motivate the team towards achieving a project goal.
No. The Sprint Backlog is the representation of the tasks that are drawn from the product backlog to achieve the Sprint goal by the development team. During the Sprint Planning, the development team sets an objective which is called as a Sprint goal. Only the development team can make changes to the Sprint Backlog as they own it. None changes can be made without the authorization of the development team members.
Every event in Scrum, besides the Sprint which is a container for the other events, is an opportunity to inspect and adapt. Sometimes, Sprint is referred to as just a time frame. It is not an event like Scrum Planning, Scrum Review, Scrum Retrospective, and Daily Scrum.
Empiricism. Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known. Scrum employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and control risk. Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation are the three pillars that uphold every implementation of the empirical process control.
Scrum does not order when and how to release the product increment. The product owner decides whether to actually release the product or not once the increment is usable and meets the Scrum Team’s Definition of Done. Each increment should be released possibly with no work left undone. This implies that the product owner should be in a position to release a delivered increment instantly and with no further dependency on the development team.
It means that the team must have all the competencies to meet Sprint Goal as per definition of “Done”. Cross-functional teams can be inspected as a team of cross-functional members with domain and functional expertise. For instance, if one is declining a sprint cycle, then members with stronger skills in a cross-functional team can connect and work with other team members to finish the sprint on time. Cross-functional teams are more productive than teams with the same skilled individuals working on related projects.
The value of the product backlog lies in transparency that permits the team members to know what work needs to be done in order to produce a minimum viable product (MVP). Value is an estimated value based on assumptions. It has also to be validated by releasing the increment to the customers. Scrum facilitates early validation.
Scrum Team together negotiates and reaches an agreement. They may use Velocity as a standard to calculate how much work they can take. Product Owner optimizes the teams work by keeping the Product backlog ordered. Only, the Development team can finalize how many Product backlog Items it can complete in the Sprint. The decision of finalizing the number of product backlog items is made by the Scrum team together. They collaboratively negotiate and reaches an agreement.
The Scrum team. The scrum team which includes PO, Scrum Master, and the development team decides the sprint length. The team during retrospective will inspect and adapt on the sprint length and arrive at an agreement. The scrum master acts as a facilitator to help the team arrive at an agreement and he/she will come in only when the team is unable to decide and helps to set the sprint length. Once decided, the duration of sprint usually remains the same throughout the project.
Sprint backlog.Team members are expected to update the sprint backlog at least once a day during the scrum sprint as new information is available. Most of the scrum teams will do this during the Daily Scrum. Scrum master estimates the amount of work remaining in the sprint each day and graphs the sprint burndown chart. The sprint backlog is a plan with ample detail that changes in development can be understood in the Daily Scrum.
They do not play an active role within Scrum, they influence it through other means. Product Owner makes a decision based on the inputs received.
It only lays out the initial known and best understood requirements. The product backlog is a living artifact that evolves and constantly changes to identify what the product needs to be appropriate, useful and competitive. A well-prioritized product backlog not just makes iteration and release planning easier but also reports all the things that team plans to spend time on, as it should be transparent for both the development team and the stakeholders.
Yes, and it may capture probable backlog items for next Sprint, but the scope of next Sprint is deferred until Sprint Planning. In Scrum, each sprint delivers a potentially shippable product increment at the end of each Sprint. In Scrum, every Scrum event is an opportunity to Inspect and Adapt. In Sprint Review, inspecting the product Increment provides insight and clarity. This newly improved knowledge is used to adapt the next steps i.e. find out what to do next.
The role of the Scrum Master majorly includes the facilitation. The SM facilitates the Daily Scrum for the development team to discuss the daily tasks and to increase the team collaboration. The Scrum Master also ensures that the team is strictly adhering to the Daily Scrum meeting rule that the meeting should be time-boxed to 15 minutes only.
Ideally, the team should immediately raise the issue to the Scrum Master as an impediment. Scrum Master is responsible to take care of these kinds of problems, or impediments that stop the dev team from achieving the Sprint Goal and facilitate a team’s optimum performance. But, it is the responsibility of the team to communicate with the Scrum Master about what impediments are obstructing them. This communication occurs every day in the daily Scrum and the main purpose of it is to raise any impediments and refine the plan to meet the Sprint Goal.
This typically happens when the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete. A Sprint can be cancelled before the Sprint time-box is over. A Sprint would be cancelled if the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete. This might occur if the company changes direction or if market or technology conditions change. The abnormal termination might also occur if the team gets into the Sprint partway and finds that the work is going to consume too much time than expected in sprint planning.
No. One product has one Product Backlog, regardless of how many teams are working in that project. It is easy for the Developments teams to coordinate with other teams if one product backlog is followed throughout the project.
Never. All Sprint Backlog Items are "owned" by the entire Development Team, even though each one may be done by an individual development team member. Sprint Backlog and all of its items are collectively owned by the Development Team. No individual team member can claim ownership over an item as this would block communication and collaboration among the team members.
Only one. One product has one Product Backlog and one Product Backlog should be taken up by one Product Owner. If several development teams are working on the same product, then one product backlog is common to all of them. So, to deliver a single product, only one product owner is enough though there are several development teams present
No. Products have one Product Backlog, regardless of how many teams are used. Any other setup makes it difficult for the Development Team to determine what they should work on. A good product backlog is a result of the combined effort of the product owner, scrum master, scrum team and stakeholders and one product backlog is used to explain the work on the product.
Without a new vocabulary as a reminder for the change, very little change may actually happen. Also, the organization may not understand what has changed with Scrum and the benefits of Scrum may be lost.
Scrum adoption is good, but this massive shift needs complete dedication. The organizations that are implementing the Scrum practices every day can be successful in Scrum adoption. If Scrum is implemented with all the team members on a daily basis can increase the collaboration and a quick product delivery. So, it is recommended to implement only Scrum methodology without clubbing any other methodology as it can be applied to any complex project and will meet the project deadlines within a timeline, making the customer happy!
It can change. The Sprint Backlog makes visible all of the work that the Development Team identifies as necessary to meet the Sprint Goal. The Development Team modifies the Sprint Backlog throughout the Sprint, and the Sprint Backlog emerges during the Sprint. If the work appears to be different than expected, the dev team collaborate with the PO to negotiate the scope of the Sprint Backlog within the Sprint and adds more PBIs related to the current Sprint if necessary.
All Development Teams must have a definition of "done" that makes their combined work potentially releasable. Each Scrum team consists of its own ‘Definition of Done’. Definition of Done defines the acceptance criteria across all User Stories. Scrum requires an Increment to be releasable. This is an Increment of product. Many teams working on a single product are expected to deliver the quality of work.
No. The product increment should be usable and releasable at the end of every Sprint, but it does not have to be released. In Scrum, it is not mandatory to release each increment without accepting the acceptance criteria. The developed increments should have a value according to the customer’s needs. In short, you can say that it should be usable and releasable at the end of every Sprint without releasing to the production.
Inform the Product Owner so he/she can work with the CEO. The items selected for a Sprint have been selected as most valuable with the Product Owner. The items serve the Sprint's goal. No changes should be made that endanger the Sprint Goal. No one external to the Scrum Team can force changes on the Development Team (Sprint Backlog) and the Product Owner (Product Backlog).
The Product Owner and the Development Team. During the Sprint, the scope may be clarified and renegotiated between the Product Owner and Development Team as more is learned. As issues emerge, changes can be made to the sprint backlog to accomplish the Sprint Goal. The Development Team will then re-negotiate with the Product Owner regarding the Sprint Backlog. Although the Sprint Goal is fixed during the Sprint, the Sprint Backlog is not.
No. The entire organization must always respect a Product Owner's decisions. For the Product Owner to succeed, the entire organization must respect his or her decisions. No one is allowed to tell the Development Team to work from a different set of requirements, and the Development Team isn't allowed to act on what anyone else says. The PO can remove the product backlog items if he/she feels that is not a high priority one. Anyone can add an item to the product backlog. But, it is the PO who decides what happens to the PBI.
Firstly, it assures the Increment reviewed at the Sprint review is usable so the Product Owner may choose to release it. Secondly, it creates transparency regarding progress within the Scrum Team. All Scrum Team members must have a shared understanding of what it means for work to be complete, to ensure transparency. This is the definition of "Done" for the Scrum Team and is used to assess when work is complete on the product Increment. The Increment reviewed at the Sprint Review must be usable, so a Product Owner may choose to immediately release it.
Re-work the selected Product Backlog items with the Development Team to meet the Sprint Goal. During the Sprint scope may be clarified and re-negotiated between the Product Owner and Development Team as more is learned. The development team looks to the product owner for product backlog, for alignment and direction on the delivery of value through the sprint goal achievement through the backlog implementation. The backlog can be changed to achieve the Sprint goal, but PO is responsible for value delivered through the implementation of backlog to achieve a sprint goal.
Release an Increment to the market to learn about the business assumptions built into the product. The Product Owner manages Product Backlog against the assumption that value will be generated. This assumption remains invalidated when not checked against users and market. The Product Owner drives iterative development from an exploratory attitude, aiming at incremental progress through continuing discovery and validated learning.
No. In Scrum, Product Owner takes care of the Product Value in order to generate, deliver, and maintain a successful product. Value is likely to vary across the products and organizations. The value of the product depends on the context of the product which you are developing.
There are no such pre-conditions. Sprint Planning serves to plan the work to be performed in the Sprint. This plan is created by the collaborative work of the entire Scrum Team. Sprint Planning is time-boxed to a maximum of eight hours for a one-month Sprint. What can be achieved in this time-box may be influenced by additional practices that are however not prescribed by Scrum.
No. A Product Owner engages actively and regularly with the Stakeholders. However, to limit the disturbance to the development progress and keep a focus of the Development team high, the key Stakeholders are allowed to take part only in the Sprint Review meeting. However, any Scrum team member can interact with them at any time.
By releasing often, and updating key performance indicators (KPIs) on value after every release and feeding this information back into work on the Product Backlog. Scrum Teams deliver products iteratively and incrementally, maximizing opportunities for feedback. If a product isn't released, the opportunity to capture user and market feedback is lost. By releasing every increment and updating the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on value after every release can help to know the product built through Scrum is successful.
Whatever is the most appropriate for the Product Owner to achieve the product's goals and to optimize the value received. The Product Owner is responsible for ordering the items in the Product Backlog to best achieve goals and missions, thereby optimizing the value of the work the Development Team performs. How this is done, and what value means, may vary widely across the organizations.
The owner of a product is not only accountable for the development and release of a product, but also the cost of maintaining and operating the product. If a person 'owns' the product, he/she can be expected to be responsible for the complete lifecycle of a product.
It is a good practice, keeping in mind that market reception is the best measure of value. Indications of value on Product Backlog are useful but are only a prediction until validated against users and market.
Yes. The Scrum Master is one of the roles from the Scrum team which is responsible for ensuring the team is adhering to the Agile values and principles. The Scrum Master is the team facilitator. Along with that, the SM is responsible for clearing the obstacles, protecting the team from external interruptions and distractions that hinder the project goal.
No. Single members might handle most or all of the work of a particular Sprint Backlog item, but responsibility remains for the whole team. When each member of the Development team owns the Sprint Backlog items, the team will derail from the core-value of Agile which is nothing but the ‘Collaboration’.
The Scrum Master. It’s the responsibility of the Scrum Master to create a supporting understanding of Scrum in the whole organization. The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring the team is adhering to the Agile values and principles. The Scrum Master is the team facilitator. Along with that, the SM is responsible for clearing the obstacles, protecting the team from external interruptions and distractions that hinder the project goal.
Refer the representative to the Product Owner to discuss it. If the customer is asking for adding an item to an ongoing Sprint, adding it in a collaboration with the Product Owner is the best-suited way to add any new item to the Sprint. Because adding a new item to the product backlog without asking the product owner may result in removing a transparency and undermining trust with the Product Owner.
Timeboxing is the process of allotting a fixed and maximum unit of time for an activity. That allotted unit of time is a timebox. The goal of timeboxing is to define and limit the amount of time dedicated to an activity. The time-box set for the Sprints should not be longer than one month and should be selected considering different factors such as the risk and delivery time.
Yes. The Scrum Master position is the management level position, but it is not a manager position. Scrum Master does not manage the Scrum Team or even the Development Team but manages the Scrum process. If the Scrum Master is not at the management position, he or she may not have the influence to remove the impediments.
15 minutes. The purpose of the Daily Scrum meeting is to carry out a communication between the team members. The Scrum meeting is timeboxed to 15 minutes irrespective of the team-size and is held at the same time and place each day to reduce complexity. Also, it is usually held at the morning time when maximum team members gather to plan work for the day.
Product Owner.The Sprint can be called off before ending up the Sprint time-box. Only the Product Owner has the authority to cancel a Sprint. This happens when the Product Owner realizes that it makes no sense to finish the Sprint, as defined in Sprint Backlog. The PO may cancel the sprint under the influence of any Stakeholder, the development team, or the Scrum Master.
By facilitating their decisions and removing impediments. Scrum Master does not manage the Development Team. It is the responsibility of the Development Team to manage its own efforts. However, the Scrum Master helps them by facilitating their decisions and removing impediments and protecting them from the external distractions.
There should be one Product Backlog and one Product Owner. Many Scrum teams, each with a Scrum Master can pull work items from a single product backlog and the presence of the product owners depend on the number of product backlogs. A certain project should have only one Product Backlog and one Product Backlog should only have one Product Owner otherwise, it would be difficult to deliver the product.
One. Multiple Scrum teams, each with a Scrum Master can drag their work items from a single product backlog and the presence of the product owners depend on the number of product backlogs. A certain project should have only one Product Backlog and one Product Backlog should only have one Product Owner otherwise, it would be difficult to deliver the product.
It is not an appropriate goal since Sprint Goal should be about expected business value.
In some projects, a development team member acts as a scrum master as there is no rule set up officially that a scrum master cannot be a developer. Definitely it is hard to perform 2 roles at one time, however, it is definitely possible. A development team member playing the scrum master role depends on the team, team members skills and internal choice of manager or team. Ultimately, everything is possible in agile-scrum projects.
The development team should ask the executive to work with the Product Owner. The product owner is the voice of the executives in the process of communicative discovery. How the feature is developed is up to the PO and the Scrum Team, and depends on the nature of the product under deployment and the availability of the stakeholders. The product owner represents the needs and desires of the executive to the development team and prioritizes their work that helps the team to do it in the right way.
The Scrum Master should let the team decide the format of Product Backlog items.The product owner brings forward the main objective that should be achieved in the sprint and the PBIs that would help to attain these objectives. The development team selects the PBIs that will help to achieve the sprint goal based on the product owner input and creates the plan for delivering the PBIs. The scrum master ensures that the scrum rules are followed appropriately. There is no need for a scrum master to conduct events, but instead to facilitate as required.
You should gladly volunteer because being a Scrum Master in an organization also involves responsibilities to coach the organization.
No. The benefit of forming self-organizing teams is not that the team identifies some additional role within the scrum for its work that a manager has missed. Instead, it is that by enabling the team to self-organize, it is motivated to completely own the problem of performing the work at its best. In short, a self-organizing team is a group of motivated individuals who have the authority and ability to take decisions and adjusting to changing demands quickly and easily working together towards a goal.
The development team should ask him to work with the Product Owner.
The product owner only. A customer shouldn’t spend time detailing the product issues to the development team, this is a job of a product owner. The product owner is responsible for the project success and is finally responsible to the customers, team and to the company. He/she is the voice of the customer to the development team and ensures that all channels of communication are open and that project has ample amount of support needed to succeed.
No. The entire team collaborates with stakeholders during the product review. Scrum Master can also work with stakeholders to help them understand Scrum. Stakeholders communicate with Product owner with respect to Product Planning, its progress, and Product backlog changes. Good communication helps project stakeholders engaged and informed and keeps the scrum team focused on finishing the accepted work for the sprint.
The development team needs to facilitate. The development team is responsible for performing development work and meeting the Sprint Goal. If they have any issues within their influence to resolve, they are responsible to solve it. Scrum Master is responsible for impediments that are outside the Development Team’s influence.
Yes, the length of the sprint can be changed but it should be fixed before starting the sprint. The product owner needs to ensure that the sprint is short enough to limit business risk and also short enough so that the team can synchronize their development work with other business events. Finalized Sprint length cannot be longer than 4 weeks (1 month).
The Development Team should it transparent that they cannot make a forecast with insufficient information, and negotiate with Product Owner on refining the stories to a Ready state. In scrum, each and every iteration starts with a sprint planning meeting. During this meeting, the PO and the team discuss which stories a team will handle that sprint. The Product Owner needs to help clarify the selected Product Backlog Items. Scrum Master can also coach the Product Owner on how to accomplish this viz. by having regular Backlog Refinement sessions. Later, the team can also discuss in Retrospective.
Not necessarily. It is preferable to conduct it at the same time and the same place to reduce the complexity of meeting overheads. Unless the Product Owner and Scrum Master are also part of the Development team it is not required for Daily Scrum. Daily Scrum is for the Development Team. The Daily Scrum is not planned as a status report or management reporting mechanism. Performing Daily Scrum highlights liability and commitment in the development team.
No. After developing a product increment at the end of each sprint, a Sprint Review meeting is held. The Sprint Review meeting provides a platform to the team members to show what they accomplished during the sprint. Scrum events are time-boxed to eliminate waste and reduce risks. The team needs to address the root causes and adhere to the time-box.
This indicates that the development team added new work. The line indicating effort remaining in the burndown graph varies from team to team and day to day. If more work items (user stories and issues) are added after the sprint started then this shows an upward spike. The spike indicates added work and the Product Owner cannot add new work to Sprint Backlog without the consent of the Team.
No. The Sprint Goal gives some flexibility to the Development Team. If the work turns out to be different than expected, the Development Team collaborates with the Product Owner to negotiate the scope of the Sprint Backlog within the Sprint. In that case, the development team discusses with the PO and reaches the conclusion.
Since the introduction of the CSM qualification there has been feedback from Scrum Masters that the need for ‘soft-skills’ and how to use Scrum in a programme of product development are not taught on the CSM course; ie how to deal with people:
and how do Scrum teams work with other Scrum and Agile teams.
The SA could have added 2 days to the CSM course to cover these ‘soft-skills’ and aspects but that is a lot to teach and examine for those who wish to be Scrum Masters but have not had any ‘formal’ experience of ‘soft-skills’; we all have them, to some degree or other, just by growing-up and learning how to interact with our subordinates, peers and superiors.
It was decided that Scrum Masters should learn the ‘Scrum mechanics for the CSM qualification and be ‘introduced’ to the ‘soft-skills’ needs during their first Scrum Master engagements.
It was considered that after a minimum of 1-year experience, Scrum Masters would have been exposed to issues requiring the appropriate use of ‘soft-skills’ to resolve them.
However, the only recognition that ‘experienced’ Scrum Masters had of this new knowledge was just the time they had spent being a Scrum Master.
The SA decided to introduce the A-CSM qualification and the A-CSM course to ensure that all such qualified Scrum Masters have a ‘baseline’ of advanced Scrum knowledge and appropriate ‘soft-skill’ needs.
You can attend an A-CSM course and sit the examination at any time after you have gained your CSM qualification but even if you pass the exam, the SA have decided that you cannot be awarded the A-CSM qualification until you have at least 12 months of Scrum Master experience logged into your Scrum Alliance profile.
During the Certified Scrum Master course you will have learnt about ‘The Rules of the Game’:
However, hopefully, you were also told that being Scrum Master is about ‘servant leadership’; depending on your instructor, you may have gained a little insight into servant leadership but there is not enough time during a 2-day course to cover everything in depth.
During your Scrum Master engagements, you have probably discovered that there was more to the job than you learnt on the CSM course; things such as:
As you can see, most of these aspects of your job fall into the category of ‘soft-skills’; dealing with people, understanding their fears, needs, wants and attitudes; in a word – facilitation. Also, there are additional ‘Scrum Mechanics’ needed when working with other Scrum and Agile teams; so-called ‘Scaling Scrum’.
The A-CSM course builds on your ‘mastery’ of the ‘Scrum mechanics’, that you have learnt and practiced during and after the CSM course, by consolidating the lessons in this area that you may have already learnt during your time as a Scrum Master and introducing you to other facilitation techniques.
Having a CSM qualification indicates to employers and peers that you have the knowledge of the basic ‘Scrum mechanics’ and that you could implement the Scrum framework for a Scrum Team.
In an ‘ideal world’ all those people involved with a product development will have been appropriately trained and have fully bought into the 5 Scrum Values:
It is when these values are embodied and lived by all those involved in a product development, the Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation come to life and build trust for everyone.
We do not live in an ‘ideal world’! Ensuring that everybody involved in a product development is fully and appropriately trained is an expensive business and addressing the scepticism and fears of some people can take a significant amount of time. We all have our own personal and professional agendas; the introduction of any Agile framework be a threat to these agendas.
So how, as a Scrum Master, can you help the product development people achieve this state of ‘nirvana’?
During your early days of a Scrum Master in an organisation you will have, no doubt, come across people who are ‘less than Scrum friendly’ and have had to devise ways to encourage them to ‘play the game’.
There are many publications about individual psychology and team dynamics that you may have used as a reference and/or you may have had an Agile coach to consult for help and advice.
By having an A-CSM qualification you will demonstrate to employers that not only do you have the knowledge of the basic ‘Scrum mechanics’ and that you could implement the Scrum framework for a Scrum Team but also you have the knowledge and skills to facilitate a ‘smoother’ Scrum transformation in a ‘Scrum immature’ organisation.
The A-CSM course and qualification was introduced by the Scrum Alliance in February 2017. Since then, at the time of writing in August 2018, 953 people have passed the A-CSM examination; the list of alumni is at the Scrum Alliance Certificant Directory.
The percentage distribution of A-CSM across the world, by ‘continent’, is:
North America 67%
Europe 18%
Indian Sub-Continent 8%
Asia/Pac 6%
South America <1%
Middle East <1%
The companies that these A-CSM work in are too many to list here but the overwhelming majority are in the commercial sector, many Fortune 500 companies are represented, with just a few representing public sector organisations. However, there is a significant number of A-CSM that have not declared an organisational connection, so it is not possible to quote definitive statistics for A-CSM organisation and sector representation.
The Scrum framework is defined in The Scrum Guide; maintained and published by Scrum.org.
To get an answer to this question you must first ask the question ’What is Agile?’.
The definition of Agile is owned by the Agile Alliance that was formed in February 2001, at Snowbird, Utah. The first Agile Alliance publication was the Manifesto for Agile Software Development closely followed by the 12 Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto.
So, to answer the question, the Agile Manifesto and Principles are listed below with the explanation of how the Scrum Framework implements them.
“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more”
© 2001, the Agile Manifesto authors
These are the 4 Agile Values and any product development framework that purports to be ‘Agile’ must embody these Values in the specifics of the framework.
It is worth noting here that although the Agile Manifesto specifically talks about ‘software development’, the Agile Values and Principles can be used to develop non-software products.
Agile Manifesto explanation and how Scrum embodies the Agile Values
Scrum defines the roles for product development and specifies the necessary individual and group interactions. Although Scrum does define a product development ‘process’, it is tool agnostic.
The Scrum framework proposes a minimalist list of required ‘documentation’.
Scrum defines a Scrum Team that includes business and technical people.
Scrum uses a high-level ‘requirements list, the Product Backlog, ordered by business value the content and ordering of which is the responsibility of the Product Owner. Furthermore, the Scrum framework has frequent, short events that include consideration of recommended and requested changes to the Product Backlog.
The Scrum framework recommends that product development takes place with short, 2 to 3-week development periods, Sprints, that result in a working increment of the required product.
If appropriate, the increment may be released to the live environment at the end of a Sprint or the increments from several Sprints may be released together at 2 to 3-month intervals.
2 Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
The Scrum framework recommends that the product development requirements defined before development begins are of the lowest level of detail of the names of the business processes necessary for the product; they are ordered by business value.
At regular intervals, at least once in every Sprint, consideration is given to requested changes to the requirements and ordering. The result is that the highest business value is achieved in any given timeframe.
3 Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
See Principle 1 above.
4 Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
Scrum defines a short, 15-minute, daily event called the Scrum, when all Development Team members, both business and technical and whether full or part-time, come together to state what was done during the previous day and what is planned to do for the next day. Also stated are any problems that individual members are facing.
Any discussion of ‘matters arising’ from the daily Scrum event are conducted after the Scrum has ended.
5 Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need and trust them to get the job done.
The Scrum framework does not recognise the term ‘project’ preferring to focus on product development which may be more open-ended than the concept of a project.
However, Scrum does implement the spirit of this Principle in that it recommends appropriate empowerment to the Scrum Team and encourages cross-functional, self-organising Development Teams; the day-to day work of the Development Team is the sole responsibility of the Team and not a ‘project manager.
6 The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
The Scrum framework defines all the events when the Scrum Team and stakeholders must come together to plan, refine and review the work and to reflect on the detail of the day-to-day activities being followed; it suggests that these are done in face-to-face environments.
However, much of today’s product development involves people in geographically dispersed locations and it is financially and culturally prohibitive to gather all required people at 1 location.
Although not part of the Scrum Guide, most Scrum practitioners take advantage of the abundant video-conferencing and desktop sharing facilities available from secure internet environments.
7 Working software is the primary measure of progress.
The Scrum framework requires that the product increment requirements that are developed in a Sprint must pass the quality criteria defined in a ‘Definition of Done’ to be considered complete and fit for demonstration to stakeholders.
Organisational product development progress is measured by the number of requirements that have been completed; task and activity progress, if used, is the sole responsibility of the Development Team and is not published to persons outside of the Development Team.
8 Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
The Scrum Guide does not mention sustainable development specifically.
However, it is part of the Scrum Master’s responsibilities to remove impediments to the Development Team’s progress; one such impediment may be that the Development Team as a whole, individual team members and/or stakeholders may be working too hard.
It is a proven fact that productivity reduces when people are stressed and tired. The Scrum Master must look-out for signs of ‘overwork’ in those involved in the product development and help overcome the problem.
In this way, the Scrum Master can promote sustainable development.
9 Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
The Scrum Guide does not mention technical excellence or good design specifically.
However, the Guide does require that only “Done” requirements can be demonstrated to stakeholders. The ‘Definition of Done’, the checklist of criteria that defines when a requirement is “Done”, will vary from product to product and organisation to organisation but will most probably include technical excellence and good design criteria.
10 Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.
This is a widely misunderstood Principle but essentially means ‘only do today what is essential to do today’. For example, is it essential to gather all the detailed requirements before development work begins? The answer is no; we gather the most important requirements at a high-level of detail; these may change over time and the time taken getting the details ‘up-front’ will be wasted.
All the aspects of the Scrum Guide embody a minimalist approach to the amount of work to be done.
11 The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Scrum requires the use of cross-functional, empowered and self-organising teams.
12 At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.
The Scrum Guide defines the Sprint Retrospective event where the Scrum Team inspects itself and creates a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint.
the development of the Scrum framework is not linear; different people did independent studies and experiments and gradually the ideas and concepts coalesced into what we know today as Scrum.
Probably the first publication that compared product development to the game of rugby, moving the scrum down the field, was the white paper “The New New Product Development Game” by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, published in the Harvard Business Review in January 1986.
In this whitepaper, the authors researched the product development methods of prominent and successful companies and concluded that, in the main, success relied upon:
They called such processes ‘Holistic Methods’ as opposed to the waterfall ‘sequential’ processes.
Some sources attribute the ‘invention’ of Scrum to Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna in 1993 when they implemented Scrum at the Easel Corporation.
Independently, Ken Schwaber, as a software product development manager in the 1980s and early 1990s, recognised patterns of failure in many product development initiatives that used ‘waterfall’ approaches.
Ken tells the story that he approached a process engineering company, described the software development environment and ‘waterfall’ process; he was told that a ‘defined process’ such as ‘waterfall’ was very unlikely to succeed consistently in a software development environment; what is needed is an ‘empirical process’ that allows process change from feedback from short experiments.
You would need to ask Jeff or Ken how these 2 first came together to ‘compare notes’ but they collaborated to produce the first public presentation of Scrum at OOPSLA 1995.
There have been many other people involved with the development of the Scrum framework; people such as Jim Coplien and Mike Beedle.
Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle published the first Scrum book, ‘Agile Software Development with Scrum’, in 2001.
There are many product development frameworks that embody the Agile Manifesto values and Principles from the more well known to specific, bespoke frameworks in a single organisation. The more well-known frameworks and what they contribute to the Agile movement overall are:
The APF is the only Agile framework to include advice and processes specifically about product development governance; aspects such as Product Vision, Objectives, expected Benefits, Business Case, management structure and communication plans.
Other Agile frameworks do not go into these details because they believe that organisations already have governance processes in place; for those organisations that do, the processes are not usually suitable for use in an Agile environment.
Similarly, the APF includes the most information about the processes required to release increments of the product into the live environment.
One of the APF phases, ‘Evolutionary Development’, can be replaced with other Agile frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban or Lean Software Development.
David Anderson developed the Kanban framework from the concept of a kanban adding required process management aspects.
The values that Kanban brings to the Agile community are:
XP focusses on software development techniques and as such contributes the following to the Agile community:
“As a {role name}
I need to {name of business process}
So that {business reason for the business process need}”
This does not double the cost of software development because the reduction in rework needed when using pair programming more than compensates for the apparent extra cost.
TDD is concerned with Unit Tests; other testing, such as system, integration and user testing is carried out much as the same as in any other framework.
Just as with Pair Programming, above, the quality increase of first-pass coding dramatically reduces any necessary rework.
CI allows for any integration errors being found as soon as practicable and they are fixed before further development continues.
Although there are significant costs to refactoring during the product development, the cost of the product maintenance is significantly reduced because the source code is easier to read.
There are not many implementations of XP in the world but, as you are probably aware, the above techniques developed by XP practitioners are used by practitioners in many other Agile frameworks.
The concepts embodied in the LSD Principles can be used to enhance Agile Values and Principles:
The following are the major misinterpretation or breaking of each of the Agile Principles and suggested ways to fix the problem(s); there are many other ways that some organisations try to ‘break the rules’ but the fixes apply in most cases; it is how the fixes are applied that may vary:
Some people focus on the ‘happy customer’ aspect of this Principle and will do whatever the customer asks. This may make the customer happy in the short-term but the real value to the customer is delivering valuable increments of the product as early and continuously as possible.
The fix – ensure the development team and customer agree on a regular Sprint and Release Schedule and ensure that they keep to it.
Some Agile teams understand the word "welcome" here as permission to forget about any requirements management at all. What is the easiest way to welcome change? Obviously, just get rid of any requirement documents! However, this Principle does not mean abandoning any requirements management process.
The fix – Ensure that the Product Owner maintains an ordered Product Backlog and that all change requests are handled by the Product Owner; the PO will decide if the change is justified and, if it is, whether the request is important enough to interrupt the current Sprint or whether it is placed on the Product Backlog in the appropriate business value position.
Working together doesn't mean working without clearly defined rules and processes. Some teams interpret this Principle as a legalization of chaos; they think that, since we work together, we do not need to define roles, we should not document requirements and we should not care about responsibilities.
This is clearly nonsense; Agile requires that all the responsibilities necessary for successful product development must be identified and an individual or group of individuals take on one or more of those responsibilities.
The fix – As a Scrum Master, for new Scrum Teams, ensure that a workshop is held with the Scrum Team and key stakeholders to define all the necessary responsibilities and ensure that all the responsibilities have been accepted by one or more people appropriately.
Do not allow individuals to ‘quote’ their named role job specification to avoid responsibilities; if they have the knowledge and capacity to fulfil a responsibility outside of their job specification, then they could accept that responsibility.
This Principle focuses on the wellbeing of all involved with product development but it must not be forgotten that the prime focus of product development is to deliver value to the ‘customer’; the Development Team cannot just keep working at a comfortable pace if they are not meeting the ‘value deadlines’ set by the ‘customer.
The fix – As the Scrum Master, you need to ensure that the Development team estimate the Product Backlog Items and agree with the Product Owner what is possible in a fixed time and what is included in the Product Backlog MVP; ensure that the Product Owner is aware of his/her responsibility to measure the rate of delivery of business benefit.
This Principle means that there must be technical ‘rules’ in place that must be checked for in each developed requirement source code before it can be considered “Done” and allowed to be reviewed by stakeholders. If these rules are not in place or they are not checked for, then the quality level will decrease resulting in an unhappy ‘customer’ and reduced progress as required rework is done.
The fix – As the Scrum Master, encourage the Development Team, Product Owner and technical advisors to agree what the technical and design quality criteria are and how they will be checked for; the agreement forms the “Definition of Done” (DoD) that each requirement and increment will be checked against before it is reviewed by stakeholders.
To some developers, it is tempting to ‘future proof’ their work, adding functionality that may be or known to be needed later.
This results in slowed progress and potential work when the perceived later need does not transpire.
The fix – Ensure that there is some DoD item that check for future-proofing in requirement source code. This will encourage developers to:
‘Only do today what is essential to do today’
We say that the Development Team should be self-organising for the work that they do during Sprints but they are subject to constraints such as:
This Principle not just about the Development Team; the self-organising concept applies to the wider group of business and technical stakeholders that must work closely together so that the product can provide the best business value.
The fix – As the Scrum Master, you must analyse any constraints that the Development Team must work with and ensure that adequate processes are in place whereby requested changes are speedily analysed and accepted or not.
This Principle is embodied in the Scrum ‘Inspect and Adapt’ Pillar and is enacted through the Sprint Retrospective event.
The Sprint Retrospective is not just about discussing what is wrong but also what is good and maybe the team should do more of.
At the start of an Agile Transformation the team may ‘find’ many things that are ‘wrong’; the long list may be seen by some to be time wasting and others as demotivating; ‘how are we going to address all these problems?’.
Because of this, many teams give up on the Retrospective!
The fix – The discovery of good and bad things during a Retrospective should be time-boxed to maybe 15 minutes when the major points will be discovered. There are many Retrospective Games that can be played by the team members to make the discovery more enjoyable.
An important part of the Retrospective is that the team prioritise the issues and plan how to resolve the top 1 or 2 issues in the coming Sprint.
Progress on issue resolution can be done during the daily Sprint and the overall success of the improvement plans checked at the start of the next Sprint retrospective.
The following is a quite comprehensive list of attitudes and skills that contribute to be a great Scrum Master; of course, you don’t have to meet this entire list to be a great Scrum Master; consider it as some inspiration on areas you might want to research.
The empirical process control theory asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known ie at defined points within an overall control process, teams must inspect what has happened and, from that experience, adapt the process to what will happen.
The Scrum framework is founded on empirical process control theory so the included ‘Transparency, Inspect and Adapt’ processes are indispensable.
Scrum relies on transparency. Decisions to optimize value and control risk are made based on the perceived state of the artefacts. If the transparency of artefacts is incomplete, these decisions can be flawed, value may diminish and risk may increase
Scrum users must frequently inspect Scrum artefacts and progress toward a Sprint Goal to detect undesirable variances. Their inspection should not be so frequent that inspection gets in the way of the work.
If an inspector determines that one or more aspects of a process deviate outside acceptable limits, and that the resulting product will be unacceptable, the process or the material being processed must be adjusted. An adjustment must be made as soon as possible to minimize further deviation.
Transparency and Inspection are important in the Daily Scrums and Sprint Reviews. Although Adaptation is mainly considered during the Sprint Retrospective, it should be considered at any time during the Sprint if the current process is significantly detrimental to the best value being achieved.
The Inspect and Adapt process is important throughout the Sprint but especially during the ceremonies:
The results of these Inspections should lead the team to considering the Adaption of the process that they followed
Scrum prescribes four formal events for inspection and adaptation, as described in the Scrum Events section of the Scrum Guide; as a Scrum Master you should attend the events and ensure the team are following the ‘Transparency, Inspect and Adapt’ processes:
When problem solving and idea creation is needed, for example when constructing the Product Backlog from a product Vision, Objectives and expected Benefits, there are 2 strategies that are usually used, divergent and convergent thinking.
The “divergent thinking” strategy used to solve problems is the proposal of multiple possible solutions then examining each to determine the solution that will work.
In a ‘problem solving’ workshop, the participants are asked for any ideas individually; writing on ‘sticky notes’ is a good idea. The results are analysed to see if there is any overlap and the participants agree a single list of potential solutions.
Brainstorming and free writing are two processes that involve divergent thinking.
During the analysis of the potential solutions unexpected combinations may be made, information may be changed into unanticipated forms, connections among remote associates may be identified. In divergent thinking, a single question returns multiple answers and though the answers vary considerably depending on the workshop participants, all answers are of equal value; each proposed solution may not have existed before and therefore may be novel, surprising or unusual.
Divergent thinking has been detected in people with personality characteristics such as curiosity, nonconformity, persistence and readiness to take risks.
An extreme example of divergent thinking was when Twitter developed an online service that did not have any obvious practical application. The company deployed a basic application to find out how people used it and, based on the findings, refined the application. Though launching something and finding out what the market for it is only after the launch doesn’t have to be a bullet-proof strategy (in most cases it is not), this worked for Twitter.
Once the divergent thing ‘phase’ of the problem-solving session has been ‘completed’, the workshop participants use convergent thinking to bring together the different ideas to determine a single best solution.
The term “convergent thinking” was ‘created by Joy Paul Guilford. He came up with the term as an opposite term to “divergent thinking”.
Convergent thinking needs speed, logic and accuracy and relies on identifying the known, reapplying techniques and amassing stored information.
A vital part of convergent thinking is that it produces one best answer; you either have a right answer or a wrong one.
An example of where convergent thinking would be used is when the problem is:
“If there are 3 potential outsourcing companies, which one do we choose?”
This would require listing all the criteria that the ‘buying’ company need from an outsourcing company and examining each to see which has the best ‘off-the-shelf’ fit or maybe which is open to negotiate to meet all the required criteria.
Divergent thinking is used to go from one stated problem to many potential solutions.
Convergent thinking is used to from multiple potential solutions to the correct one.
Frames of reference are everywhere. For example, if you are in the northern hemisphere and you investigate the night sky, you will see the visible universe as a collection of stars grouped into constellations. Now imagine a person in the southern hemisphere looking at the night sky; the person will still see the visible universe as a collection of stars grouped into constellations but they will be a different set; the 2 people have different frames of reference.
If the person in the southern hemisphere says to the person in the northern hemisphere “I think that there is something happening to the fourth star in the Southern Cross constellation”, the northern hemisphere person may not know what the other is talking about and certainly could not tell if something was happening or not
We all have our own unique frames of reference for every subject in our heads; they are based on our experiences of childhood, parenting, education, religion, previous interactions with other people etc and even where we are physically located.
If you live in a country where there are words written in the road to warn you of something, like “SLOW”, if you are in a car, you will see the word SLOW ‘normally’ but if you were in a helicopter above the word you will see it vertically elongated.
It is the same sign but it is seen differently because of the different frame of reference of the viewers.
So why is this important to you? When people are communicating the words and ideas that they express come from their own frame of reference and the potential for mis-communication is high if the frames of reference of the listener is not like that of the listener. Imagine trying to describe a hippopotamus to someone who has never seen one; would you try an analogy with something your listener had seen? Would you try to draw one? Not simple!
As a Scrum Master/Facilitator you need to be aware of different peoples’ frames of reference when they are communicating so that you can spot possible misunderstandings in listeners.
The participants in product development workshops will all have their own frames of reference from business and technical and even between people within the same skillset depending on their individual experience.
Listen for jargon and abbreviations in conversation and ensure that all listeners know what the speaker is talking about.
After a period of divergent thinking (see Q – What are ‘divergent’ and ‘convergent’ thinking? ), most groups enter a Groan Zone.
Having just ‘brainstormed’ a list, the next task, in theory, is simple; sift through the ideas and pick a few to discuss in depth.
In practice that task can be difficult because everyone has their own frame of reference; when people misunderstand one another, they become more confused, more impatient and possibly more self-centred; people repeat themselves, they interrupt, they dismiss other people's ideas and rudely put each other down.
Without a facilitator, at some point, the participants will agree to almost anything, any half-baked, unrealistic, mediocre compromise, just if it will get them out of the room.
One way to help workshop participants gain an understanding of each other's ideas is to encourage them to ask direct questions of one another and listen carefully to the answers.
However, there are some challenges to this ‘simple’ approach:
Making decisions in a group has its advantages and disadvantages; the main advantage is that there will be more information and data available by which to make the decision; the main disadvantage is that it can take a significant amount of time.
Let us consider first a jury for a trial. The decision that they must make is ‘black and white’ or binary; is the defendant guilty of not guilty?
A jury session usually starts with a vote amongst the jurors, guilty or not guilty. There follows a discussion between people on either side why they have the opinion that they have. By this means, each juror hears opinions about pieces of evidence that they may have forgotten or dismissed and the relative importance of different pieces of evidence.
After a set time, another vote is taken to see in which direction the overall opinion is ‘going’.
It depends on whether a majority or unanimous verdict is required; if majority, once the requisite number of people all vote the same way, the decision is made; if unanimous, there is a danger that that the longer the discussions go on, those in the minority will vote with the rest just to ‘get it over with’.
There is another decision that a jury can make, they cannot agree to the set majority or unanimous parameters and inform the judge.
But not all decisions are ‘black and white’, most represent a range of options that must be chosen from. The following are the major recognised ways in which groups of people can come to a decision:
Voting of some form will always form part of any decision-making process. In all discussion-based decision-making, votes are solicited at regular intervals to get a ‘snapshot’ of the group’s opinions and to decide in which direction further discussion would be beneficial.
The following are some of the voting processes that may be used:
This method is a structured communication technique for groups, originally developed for collaborative forecasting. It involves ‘experts’ answering a series of questionnaires and after each questionnaire is completed, a facilitator presents anonymised results and the reasons for those results. The idea is that each expert modifies their opinion based on the reasons and it is expected that the range of opinions becomes smaller and converges on the ‘best’ decision.
You can possibly see that Consensus decision making is a less structured version of Delphi; all workshop participants are experts in their own field, but their opinions are not anonymised.
Using this method, participants are asked to place ‘sticky dots’ or use maker pens to indicate for which option they vote for. The may be given one vote or a range, identified by colours, such as ‘I want this one’ (green), ‘I would be OK with this one’ (orange) and ‘I do not want this one’ (red).
There are different ways of using the results:
used especially when listening. Therefore, they need a space where they will be comfortable and without distractions.
As a facilitator, ensure that the workshop space:
The following are techniques to help with facilitative listening:
It may be that the listener does not totally understand the statements being made by someone:
Both are examples of paraphrasing.
Part of your responsibility as a facilitator is to be aware of the listeners ‘body language’ and if you believe that one or more are not fully understanding what is being said, you could ask:
Workshops are set up for participants to express themselves but more than just space for expression is needed. If a participant speaks without a sense of being heard, they are likely to either ramp up their expression or else shut down neither of which is desirable for collaborative decision making. Mirroring requires that the speaker can feel that they have been listened to.
Mirroring may take a variety of forms:
Mirroring may happen in the moment of a session or in after/between sessions as part of a longer, iterative process.
The effectiveness of Mirroring may be enhanced by checking with those reflected to see if the Mirroring was accurate.
Not all the Mirroring needs to be done by one central facilitator. A facilitator can also invite others to participate in Mirroring, whether in the whole group or in pairs or small groups.
Mirroring summarizes the state of current knowledge. Once what is now known is acknowledged, that naturally opens space for new ideas and creativity to emerge, whether for one participant in a meeting or for a group.
This technique to aid facilitative listening is called ‘Taking Stack’ and its purpose is to facilitate discussion and decision making in which all participants have equal say in a conversation. Otherwise, in a structure-less setting, an individual or a small group of people could easily dominate and shut out other participants.
For this method, one group participant needs to fill the role of the Stack Keeper whose responsibility is to structure and order the dialogue of the decision-making process.
“The Stack” is the order of participants who are speaking. If a participant raises their hand to say something, the Stack Keeper puts them on “Stack”; their name is put at the bottom of stack list. When the person at the top of Stack has finished speaking, the Stack Keeper crosses their names off and announces who the next two participants on stack are.
Thus, the Stack Keeper is the person responsible for identifying who speaks and when. The Stack Keeper must constantly be paying attention and looking around the room to see who wants to speak.
There are other hand gestures to indicate a request for more immediate contribution when someone else is speaking:
If a participant has a “direct response” to something that another group member said, they should make the hand motion shown in the picture (index fingers out, thumbs up, moving hands up and down in opposite directions). A “direct response” is only a correction to something that was incorrectly stated by another participant, an answer to a question that another participant had, or that is so important that it must be said at this moment.
The Stack Keeper allows this participant to state their response before the conversation goes on.
Correct Usage: “You asked who volunteered to take over your shift? That was me.” OR “, the store spent $100 dollars yesterday, not $1,000.”
Incorrect Usage: “I disagree with what you just said, because…”
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Any participant may make the hand gesture in the picture to indicate that they want to ask a “clarifying question.”
The Stack Keeper allows them to ask their question before stack goes on.
Correct Usage: “Wait, what were our expenses last week?”
Incorrect Usage: “How can you say that when you disagreed with Jeremy’s point?”
If a participant feels that the group discussion is not following the correct procedure or a discussion has gotten off topic, they may make this hand gesture and say out loud “Point of Process.”
The Stack Keeper allows them to speak before the next person at the top of stack. They must then say how they think the discussion has gotten off topic or is not following procedure.
Example 1: “I’m not sure why we’re talking about shifts when the agenda says we’re supposed to be talking about salaries.”
Example 2: “There’s a proposal on the table, and I think we should resolve that before we move on to anything else.”
Although a Scrum Master is said to facilitate the team to produce the best results, workshop facilitation is sometimes a different matter.
A workshop facilitator must be independent of the topics being discussed and should not contribute facts or opinions to the conversation.
In most general product development workshops, if he/she has the skills, the Scrum Master may facilitate the workshop.
However, if the workshop is to discuss something like modifying the Scrum process, the Scrum Master does have important things to contribute and should not facilitate that workshop.
The following facilitator activities are required when preparing for a workshop:
The coaching stance is what the Agile Coaching Institute (ACI) refers to as “the heart” of their Agile Coach Competency Framework. The coaching stance is supposed to be the place you start from and return to.
The coaching stance elements highlighted are:
There are many lists of coaching techniques; the following is a comprehensive list but not exhaustive:
This technique brings a clear structure into goals. Each goal or milestone comes with clear and verifiable elements instead of vague resolutions. The broad goal of “I want to grow my business” will be described in much more detailed and action-oriented steps by the client. The SMART goal could be: “I will win five new clients for my business within this month by asking for referrals, creating two useful blog articles and social media networking”.
It’s easy to help them get going with just a few simple questions like: “What was the most valuable takeaway from this session?”. This coaching technique helps you to find out the client’s “A-ha” moments and to avoid misunderstandings.
If all these notes are organized in a shared stream that is accessible to both you and the client you can reread and recap these nuggets any time at later stages during the process.
Writing enhances your client’s power of observation and focus during a change or development process.
A study with two groups has shown that people who write down goals and make a weekly progress report achieved their goals at a rate of 76%, whereas the participants of the group who didn’t write anything down achieved their goals at a rate of only 36%.
This ongoing feedback as a follow-up between sessions is a perfect way to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the coaching. It shows your clients that you really care about their progress and gives them the feeling they’re not alone with their challenges.
A coaching journal is like the ongoing feedback described before. Your clients can write down their emotions, experiences, observations, challenges, success, thoughts, and feelings. They don’t have to wait until the next sessions which might be in a week or two but can share what’s on their mind right in the moment where it happens.
A shared journal gives your clients the feeling that you’re always there for them and “listening” without the need of your presence. They can write whenever they feel like it; at night, in the morning, during the day, at the train station on the way to their workplace or while waiting at the doctor.
A coaching journal gives them the ability to focus on themselves only without any time pressure or distractions. Once written down they can always reread and recap prior entries at a later stage of their process. Once these thoughts are shared with you you’ll gain invaluable information that will take your coaching and mentoring to the next level.
Homework helps to see if and how the plans from each session are being applied; it helps clients to keep the focus on their plans, ideas, and goals.
The GROW model – The GROW model is a simple method for goal setting and problem-solving in coaching. It includes 4 stages:
Another benefit is that both of you know what is getting done and what isn’t at any moment during the process. You immediately see where they procrastinate or struggle and when your support is needed. The shared to-do list helps to set priorities, achieve milestones faster and keep track of the small wins during a coaching process.
It shouldn’t be just a vague description but a whole day from start to finish:
This technique will encourage the client to use his/her positive imagination and visualize what he/she truly desires.
Afterwards, you can work together to get the actual steps to that “miracle” where the goal is achieved.
Add comments, plans, notes, and ideas for the next session.
Self-organising teams is one of the keys to Agile success but experienced developers who are used to working in a ‘command and control’ environment may find it difficult to adopt this Agile practice; they are used to being told what to do and sometimes how to do it.
Instead of asking the Project Manager (PM) what to next, a developer needs to look at the Team Board and choose what to do next; instead of asking the PM how to do something, he/she should consult their peers on the development team; if no one knows, that is an impediment and the Team should discuss how to resolve the issue. The Scrum Master, as the Risks and Issues Manager, can help the team decide how to resolve the problem but should not be expected to solve it for them.
The main coaching techniques that a Scrum Master can use to help the team become more self-organising are
Powerful Questions are open questions ie they cannot have a yes or no answer; they usually start with ‘who’, ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘how’ or ‘where’; they may also start with statements such as ‘Tell me about …’.
Reflecting a statement back to an individual can help prompt further exploration; for example, “You said you were worried about the quality of the product so far … tell me more”.
For more information about Powerful Questions, see Coaching with NLP.
To foster the intrinsic motivation, we need to examine the following aspects of individuals and the Team:
Giving individuals and teams more control of what to do, when and how to do it, motivates them more.
Also, if individual Team members identify with their team (their tribe) the team becomes more autonomous and self-directing.
As a Scrum Master you should discover what the Team members know now and ask them to have a go at something small but significant in Scrum and give them the space and time to experiment on their own to work out how to do it.
Most people want to do better; by helping individuals and Teams toward Mastery leads to greater Team self-organisation.
Whenever possible, involve the Team in the early stages of product development; let them hear the discussions about forming the Product Vision and Objectives; let them have an input to the Product Backlog ordering.
For more about Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose see Drive by David Pink and Intrinsic Motivation by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci
Give the speaker your undivided attention and show that you are hearing the message; your non-verbal communication, body language, can help the speaker feel comfortable.
Use your own body language and gestures to show that you are engaged.
Your own assumptions, judgments, and beliefs can ‘distort’ what you hear. As a listener, your role is to understand what is being said; this may that you have to ask questions to clarify what is being said.
Interrupting a speaker is a waste of time; it is frustrating for the speaker and reduces understanding of the message.
Do not ‘attack’ the speaker; show respect and understanding of the speaker’s position. You are gaining information and perspective.
See Four Active Listening Techniques and Characteristics of Effective Listening for further reading
There are many challenges facing self-organising teams which can be grouped into the following categories:
Organisational inertia. In organisations that have been around for some time, the way that things are done have become habits; many supervisor and management personnel are reluctant to change from fear of their job changing significantly or disappearing altogether
Individual Team members’ inertia. Individual Team members may have fears about:
having to learn new techniques
accepting greater responsibility
learning to cooperate with other team members more
taking on activities outside of their specialist skills
A Scrum Master must be aware of these potential challenges to self-organisation, look for signs of them and help both the organisation and Teams to overcome them.
Below are 3 typical challenges faced by teams and the possible help that a Scrum Master can give:
Bad Forecast: In the early stages of an Agile transformation, the Teams may be asked to estimate using Story Points, relative estimating, instead of the conventional task estimates that they have been used to. This technique requires practice to become proficient and early attempts may result in the forecast at Sprint Planning for Product Backlog Items (PBI) to be attempted being significantly in error, generally, Teams tend to under-estimate. This may demotivate some Team members and make them question the use of the new technique.
Solution: During the early Sprints, at the daily Scrums, the Team will realise that their progress toward the agreed Sprint Goal is slower than they would like. As a Scrum Master, you should ask the Team if there is anything they can do to improve progress; some changes could improve progress.
However, the time to address the underlying problem to do with estimating is during the Sprint Retrospective when the estimates for each Sprint Plan PBI should be compared to ‘actuals’ to see if there was any common reason for the estimates being inaccurate or if there were one or two ‘one-off’ estimating mistakes.
If there was a common or systemic reason for inadequate estimates, the Team must re-estimate the Product Backlog in the light of the new evidence; if the errors were due to ‘one-off’ inaccuracies, the Team should re-estimate similar User Stories in the Product Backlog.
Emphasise with the Team that nobody is expecting ‘perfection’ straight away; the importance is that they take time to learn from their experience and apply that learning going forward.
Technical Debt: We build products incrementally; ‘only do today what you need to do today’. It is probable in later increments that some code that worked for a previous increment no longer works for the current increment so the code is changed. Over time a single method in the code may have had several ‘patches’ applied to it so that becomes difficult to read and restructure when further ‘patches are needed; this may cause de-motivation in some Team Members and even cause arguments between them about the state of the code.
The programmers aim is for ‘clean’ and simple code but the temptation is to produce something that works now without considering future maintenance needs. The fact that the resulting code may not be ‘clean’ and simple is known as Technical Debt.
Solution: Resolving Technical Debt costs time and money; the longer you leave the resolution, the more time and money it costs to resolve.
There are 3 suggested solutions that a Scrum Master can encourage the Team to adopt to address potential Technical Debt problems:
Definition of Done (DoD): Ask the Team to add an item to the DoD to ensure all new or changed code is peer reviewed to ensure that the structure is ‘clean’ and any potentially reusable code fragments are refactored to their own method.
Do not let the Team wait until the end of the Sprint to do the code reviews, have them do it once the programmer believes that he/she has finished. In this way, there is the shortest time between ‘finished’ and any refactoring that may be needed.
Pair-Programming: The idea of two programmers working side-by-side to develop one function may seem counter-intuitive; it would cost twice as much to produce the code. However, in the medium to long-term, Technical Debt may be reduced or even eliminated when one programmer is looking on and offering advice to the programmer at the keyboard.
Test-Driven Development (TDD):
With TDD, no line of production code is written before a test has been written to test it, the test is run and is expected to fail. Only enough production code is written to pass the test. See Test-Driven Development.
Practicing TDD does require an Integrated Development Environment that supports it and to be successful, all programmers must have the discipline to use it.
Initially, some programmers may be reluctant to use it because of the perceived extra work; however, when they see that the maintenance effort is reduced by more than the extra initial work, they come to accept the practice.
Team Member Leaves: Each Team member has a list of responsibilities and capabilities including their own specialisation, DoD checking and contributing to work outside of their specialisation.
The Scrum Master should keep a list of all these responsibilities and capabilities so that when a Team member leaves the Team for some reason, the remaining members can distribute the leavers responsibilities and capabilities amongst themselves.
If it not possible for any of the remaining Team members to take on any required responsibility or a required capability is not available, the Scrum Master must raise this as an issue with the Product Owner and management; a Team member training may be the resolution to the issue or an additional Team member may be introduced to the Team. In the latter case, the Scrum Master should monitor how the ‘new’ Team are managing their self-organisation.
Even good self-organising teams can face challenges with Retrospectives in how they are run and addressing issues that they discover.
The following are some of the most commonly experienced challenges with their suggested solutions:
Solutions:
Solution: The Retrospective facilitator should change the format of the Retrospectives by using ‘games’ to elicit required information from the group; see Fun Retrospectives and Agile Retrospectives Ideas: Games For Your Next Retrospective for more ideas than a Retrospective facilitator could possibly use
Solution:
Generally:
The following table compares how attributes differ between working groups and teams:
| Working Groups | Teams |
|---|---|
| Individual accountability | Individual and mutual accountability |
| Come together to share information and perspectives | Frequently come together for discussion, decision making, problem solving, and planning |
| Focus on individual goals | Focus on team goals |
| Produce individual work products | Produce collective work products |
| Define individual roles, responsibilities, and tasks | Define individual roles, responsibilities, and tasks to help team do its work; often share and rotate them |
| Concern with one’s own outcome and challenges | Concern with outcomes of everyone and challenges the team faces |
| Purpose, goals, approach to work shaped by manager | Purpose, goals, approach to work shaped by team leader with team members |
There are many lists of the key attributes of effective Agile Teams produced; the following list distils and collates the common themes of most of them:
Effective Agile Teams set their own Working Agreement, Ground Rules, whereby the members know and buy-into the Team working practices into which are usually elements to do with all the following attributes.
In a successful agile team, the team members work together on features; UI designers, developers and testers work together to ensure that they, as a team, have finished a story.
All Team members are aware of their own and colleagues’ strengths and weaknesses so he/she knows who to go to for improvement advice for themselves and who else he/she can help to improve.
As the successful agile team collaborates to finish features, they avoid the problem of having many features started but none getting finished at the end of the Sprint.
Obtaining feedback at regular, short intervals is a major contributor to the success of an Agile team; they use 1 to 3-week Sprints so they can produce potentially shippable increments of a product to obtain feedback form the wider stakeholder community. During the Sprints, if it is not possible to work with end-users directly, successful teams will seek feedback at every stage of the development of each Product Backlog Item (PBI).
As in all product development, conditions are not always favourable in an Agile environment:
However, the Team must get the work done; Agile team members must be adaptable to any kind of situation (be it the ideal or the worst situation).
Agile team members must be willing to work outside their specialisations. This does not mean that they are expected to work in areas that they know nothing about; they can help other Team members under their supervision; the simplest form of this is for anybody to run test scripts if they are becoming a bottleneck.
Good intra-Team communications is one of the major characteristics of a successful Agile team; Team members:
Successful Agile teams members are fully ‘bought-in’ to the Product Vision and Objectives and are fully committed to achieving the best value for the business within the time and cost constraints.
They try to find ways to share their knowledge, learn various new things and enhance their own skills.
Also, all Team members must be able to see where Team members’ workloads stand at all times; if someone is overloaded, members must be willing to help the over-burdened person so as to smooth workflow across the team; this would normally happen during the daily Scrum.
There are several ways to help a Team improve its performance but they can be categorised as follows:
Team Accountability or Shared Accountability is taking responsibility for others ie Team members must be aware of the work that others are doing and be prepared to challenge their work for the good of the Team
The Agreement can contain anything that the Team would feel useful to enhance collaboration ie:
Adhering to the Scrum value of Respect produces Psychological Safety.
An homogenous team is one where the members are all similar in background, gender, age and culture; we are not talking about similar skillsets but general life experience.
Homogenous teams have been shown to suffer from the following drawbacks:
Stifling of creativity – homogeneous team members have a similar world view and so find it difficult to ‘think out of the box’
Communication – Although homogeneous team members may think they understand what is meant by a colleague’s jargon, they may have misinterpreted which may lead to mistakes; in Teams with members from diverse backgrounds it is more likely that such jargon will be challenged and a greater understanding is obtained by all Team members
Minorities – People not of the same background as the homogeneous Team members may have feelings of exclusion and/or discrimination
All multi-staged models for team formation recognise different stages that a group of people go through from the start, getting together, to becoming a high-performing team.
There are several published models from those that involve rigorous mathematical steps to analyse team needs and individual attributes, such as that proposed in Two Multi-Objective Stochastic
Models for Project Team Formation Under Uncertainty in Time Requirements, to the more simple and well-known Tuckman Model.
Tuckman’s model, first published in 1965, initially only had the first 4 stages in the table; he added the 5th and 6th stages in 1975.
At first the group of people are reliant on a ‘leader’ and as the group emerges as a team, they become less reliant on a ‘leader’ and become self-organising.
The ‘Definition of Done’ (DoD) is a checklist of all the activities that must be completed for a Product Backlog Item (PBI) before it can be considered ‘Done’ and is fit for review by the wider stakeholder community and potentially released to the live environment; the DoD is a key artefact for Product Development quality control.
The DoD is assembled and agreed by the Product Owner (PO) and the Development Team members.
Potential Problems with initial DoD
There is a possibility that the Team develop a minimalist DoD and submit it to the PO for approval; some PO will give it a cursory glance and approve it.
In such situations, as a Scrum Master, you should remind the PO that he/she is solely responsible for the value to be accrued from the Product Development and that he/she needs to understand each DoD element in case any have been forgotten or any are unnecessary; the best way to achieve this is for you to facilitate a DoD workshop with the PO and Development Team members.
Another problem with minimalist DoD is that they assume that small but significant steps in the development process will be done because ‘they are obvious’; they may be obvious in the ‘cold light of day’ but not so obvious in the ‘heat of development’; as a Scrum Master, you should encourage the rest of the Scrum Team to include more detail in the DoD than seems necessary; items can always be taken out if they are felt to be redundant.
DoD Examples
The DoD for software development may include items such as:
An actual DoD would probably add more detail to some of the elements.
The DoD for a PBI is usually peer-reviewed by another Team member that has not had significant input to the PBI development.
Given that Scrum is not just for software development, a DoD for a non-software product development, such as running an event, may look something like this for the PBI of ‘As the Invitations Coordinator, I need to send invitations to the event, so that we maximise attendance’:
Once all the DoD items have passed their checks, the Invitations Coordinator is authorised to send out the invitations.
The ‘Agile Technical Practices’ or ‘Agile Programming Practices’ all come from work carried out or developed from other ideas by eXtreme Programming practitioners; They are not part of Scrum or any other Agile framework but have been adopted by many, if not most, Agile programmers as a ‘toolkit’ of ‘best practice’ for producing minimal, ‘clean’ and maintainable code. The list of practices, with explanations, is as follows:
There will be many artefacts that are best displayed on a wall and it is best to keep them in one place.
Also, the Team members can obtain ‘osmotic communication’ just by being in the same area as others having conversations.
Because nothing is considered ‘finished’ the first time through (it may meet the Definition of Done for the current Sprint but may have to be modified for other functionality in a later Sprint), other programmers need access to all the code in order to update it when necessary; if they do not have access, they may write redundant code.
Contrary to some beliefs, this practice does not double the cost of development because the resulting code will be virtually bug-free thus reducing rework time considerably
The practice does require the use of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports TDD or access to a TDD framework that supports the programming language being used.
Integration system builds should be done as often as practicable to catch errors early and make them easier to find and fix.
Some organisations do a full build of source code that has been checked-in to the source code repository every 2 hours; some organisations do a full build each time code is checked-in to the source code repository.
This practice does require the use of automated system build systems.
Scaling Scrum involves using multiple Scrum Teams to produce increments of a ‘large’ product; this will involve more people with the potential communication problems.
Of the Agile Technical practices listed in the answer to the previous question, the following are essential technical practices when scaling Scrum:
The practice of TDD is the only way to ensure that a full suite of tests can be run to test the whole of the codebase.
Firstly, we must define what the Product Vision is. Just as any Vision, the Product Vision should be a short statement of what the product is for. Here are some characteristics of a good Product Vision:
Roman Pichler, the acknowledged father of Visions, says that Product Visions should be:
Additionally, make it:
Before investigating how to help the Product Owner create the Product Vision with the Development Team, let us look at a couple of examples:
“Build sports car
Use that money to build an affordable car
Use that money to build an even more affordable car
While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options
Don't tell anyone”
Whilst this Vision ‘breaks’ the one sentence guideline, it does fit Roman Pilcher’s advice.
Ikea:
“At IKEA our vision is to create a better everyday life for the many people”
This is a short and broad Vision for the company that will drive the products that the company produces ie will a proposed product help ‘create a better everyday life for the many people’.
So how does the Product Owner, who is responsible for the Product Vision, go about creating the Product Vision?
Firstly, the creation of a Product Vision is best done collaboratively; as a Scrum Master, arrange a facilitated workshop with the Product Owner, relevant stakeholders and the Development Team to ‘brainstorm’ ideas; you may facilitate the workshop yourself (see Creating A Shared Vision That Works).
There are 2 widely used ‘models’ to use to help create a Product Vision:
The idea behind the Elevator Pitch is to put together a statement about something to ‘pitch’ to the CEO when riding in an elevator; we are not going to do this; it is the elements of an Elevator Pitch that we need to explore for the product so that we can come to a suitable form of words for the Product Vision. There are different lists of Elevator Pitch elements; for now, we will look at the following list from Roman Pichler:
By ‘brainstorming’ the above elements, the workshop participants get a better understanding of the product and can converge onto a suitable Product Vision.
Roman Pichler has a downloadable Product Vision Board that you can use to organise the ‘brainstorming’ ‘sticky notes’ and capture the decisions:
In a facilitated workshop, the participants imagine the product to be a ‘shrink-wrapped’ physical box containing the product; or it may be that the product is to be ‘shrink-wrapped’.
The elements of the box are:
There is a good description of how to run a Design the Box workshop at Design the Box.
Again, as with the Elevator Pitch, the workshop participants get a better understanding of the product and can converge onto a suitable Product Vision
It is not advisable to go straight from the Product Vision to collecting requirements for the Product Backlog.
The Product Owner (PO) is solely responsible for the value produced by a Product Development and to have some understanding of this value the Product Objectives, Benefits and an initial Business Case should be investigated to check that, in all probability, the product will produce value for the company; it is no good having a great product if no one will buy it and/or it will take 5 years to recoup the development costs.
Figure 3 – From Product Vision to Product Backlog
To help the Product Owner and Development Team move from the Product Vision to the Product Backlog, as a Scrum Master, you can arrange a series of facilitated workshops to determine the Product Objectives, Business Case and Backlog.
The Product Objectives are a list of things that enable the meeting of the Product Vision.
It should not be a long list; between 5 and 10 is usual; Objectives are not requirements.
Some examples:
Although a Product Vision may state some development attribute that can be measured, most do not; it is the Objectives that should be measurable. Some people use S.M.A.R.T Objectives.
The Objectives list may also be ordered by business value and may define what is to be included in a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
From the Objectives list, we can now make an estimate of the expected benefits that we expect the product to give to the ‘customer’ (internal and/or external) and the company; each Objective may contribute to more than one category of Benefit; for example, an Objective of “Reduce report creation time by a minimum of 50%” may have the following Benefits:
Although we have used percentage values in the examples above, it is recommended that actual monetary values are used.
Now that we have the expected Benefits from developing the product, we must now estimate how much it might cost to develop.
At this point, the Development Team may not have been chosen:
To help the PO create an initial Business Case, as the Scrum Master, arrange a facilitated workshop to include the PO, relevant stakeholders and senior ‘technical’ personnel to investigate the probable costs of:
From these investigations, the workshop participants must decide as to which option will give, potentially, the best value.
The costs of the potential solution option must be compared with the expected benefits to make a cost-benefit decision as to whether the proposed product development is worthwhile.
See the APM website and other websites for more detailed information and ideas.
Once the Business Case has been approved, the PO can turn his/her attention to creating the Product Backlog.
As the Scrum Master, organise a facilitated workshop to include the PO, relevant stakeholders and the Delivery Team to discover the Product Backlog Items (PBI), usually User Stories, that will fulfil the Product Objectives.
These PBI will be estimated by the Development Team and the results fed back into the Business Case to ensure that the cost-benefit analysis still indicates a viable development.
The Sprint Retrospective is a key ceremony for ‘Inspect and Adapt’ to aid Continuous Improvement.
Many organisations have only the Development Team, facilitated by the Scrum Master, to reflect on their past process performance and make plans to improve it.
However, The Product Owner (PO) is also a member of the Scrum Team and there are advantages to having the PO included in the participants of the Retrospective:
If the Development Team have ‘a problem’ with the PO, it is tempting for them not to invite the PO to Retrospectives but this ‘problem’ is an issue and as a Scrum Master it is part of your responsibility to help resolve issues; the Retrospective is the best mechanism to discuss and resolve problems between the Development Team and the PO.
The Product Owner (PO) is responsible for all of the Product Backlog Items (PBI):
The Development Team are responsible for estimating the size and complexity of each PBI; this will be done initially just before development work begins.
During the development Sprint Planning, the Team must select the next highest value PBI to be attempted during the Sprint.
However, as time goes on, the PO and Development Team need to apply any lessons learned from development so far to ensure that the candidate PBI are sufficiently well described and sized (but see Scrum.org Myth 14); this ‘confirmation’ is done during Backlog Refinement during which the following questions are answered:
All of these criteria and others to suit a specific situation can be documented as a ‘Definition of Ready’ checklist.
There are a series of blogs that make interesting background reading: Product Backlog Refinement explained. See also Grooming the Product Backlog
Although using BDD requires a toolset that might not be available, you can use the structured language to create PBI Acceptance Criteria:
Given {some context}
When {some action is carried out}
Then {a particular set of observable consequences should happen}
An example:
Given my bank account is in credit, and I made no withdrawals recently,
When I attempt to withdraw an amount less than my card's limit,
Then the withdrawal should complete without errors or warnings
For many years, business stakeholders have seen or been involved with building products using the so-called ‘waterfall’ model; business stakeholders are intensely involved at the beginning of the development to specify the detailed requirements and do not get involved again until just before deployment to do User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
People get used to a way of working even if they experience problems with it; it is human nature to ‘get on with it’ and/or develop personal ways of mitigating the problems that they experience.
Many business stakeholders are sceptical about ‘wholesale’ changes to the way that they are being asked to work especially as, superficially, their involvement with the product development is significantly increased.
Also, many senior business managers are risk averse and require predictability from the product development process.
The reasons why the waterfall development model evolved are beyond the scope of this question; to explain Agile to a business stakeholder, you need to know the major elements of the waterfall model that can cause ‘problems’ for the business:
Each business stakeholder will have had frustrations based on one or more of potential waterfall problems; before trying to explain the whole of Agile, it is recommended to start by discovering which areas of the waterfall development process is causing the frustrations and explaining the aspects of Agile that will help overcome them.
One model of product development to base your explanations around is ‘The Iron Triangle’
The 'Iron Triangle' - Waterfall
Waterfall sets out to define all the detailed requirements and plan how they will be implemented; the resulting ‘contract’ assumes that features, time and cost are all fixed.
However, as already said, it can take a long time to capture the detailed requirements and plan their implementation; however, things never go according to plan (requirement changes, staff changes) and so, when trying to implement a ‘fixed’ requirements list, the result will probably be time and cost overruns.
An Agile product development approach turns the ‘iron triangle’ upside-down:
The 'Iron Triangle' - Agile
You can see from Figure 4 that with an Agile product development process:
The requirements variability is based on ‘high-level’ requirements and needs some rules to give the business some confidence; the main rule is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
One of the major advantages of an Agile product development process over a waterfall one is that the product is delivered incrementally allowing some return on investment before the product is ‘completed’. Incremental delivery can also help with experimentation when the product details are unclear; parts of the potential final product can be deployed early to get ‘customer’ feedback that will help produce a better product.
One of the important factors when explaining Agile to a business stakeholder is to make sure that they understand the major differences in output that they can expect compared with waterfall and the differences expected of them:
Another approach to answering this question can be found at How to Explain Agile to Your Stakeholders.
There are many opinions as to what the ‘typical’ impediments that Scrum Teams face are; the following list is not exhaustive but covers the impediments that Scrum Teams may probably face:
Also, when Development Team Members, new to Scrum, are under ‘pressure’, it is natural for them to revert to old work practices because they know them and having to think about and use the new work practices takes more time and increases the pressure.
Solution:
During the early stages of an Agile Transformation, the role of a Scrum Master as the Risks and Issues Manager, is key.
During the daily Scrum, he/she must listen to what the Development Team members have been working on and what they plan to be working on; note any item that does not seem to be adding to achievement of the Sprint Goal and discuss with the relevant developer after the Scrum has finished. If the item is a ‘hang-over’ from the old ways of working, the Scrum Master must identify the person who asked for the item and engage them in a ‘Scrum Mentoring’ session to explain why their request is inappropriate.
Similarly, the Scrum Master should question any developer that does not seem to be following the Agile and Scrum practices; for example, the developer may be building the user interface for a User Story from his/her own knowledge, because it is quicker, without collaborating with a relevant business person to get the correct information.
Solution:
Scrum requires that the Development Team is made up of all the skills necessary for the development and that the relevant resources are dedicated to the product development.
The Scrum Master must work with the matrix managers to assign resources to one product development at a time for the long-term and not assign people based on short-term expediency.
There may be occasions when a particular Development Team member is considered to be the only person who can solve a problem outside of their immediate product development responsibilities; as long as this is to be a short-term (1 to 3 days) commitment, it is allowable but their reduced development capacity must be reflected in the Team’s expected velocity. If this situation is a common occurrence, it is a significant impediment to the Team’s progress and the Scrum Master must escalate the impediment to the Product Owner.
The team member skills are different for each ‘phase’ of the waterfall development process, whereas with Scrum we require all necessary skills to be available at all times throughout the development:
Solution:
As in Distractions above, the Scrum Master must work with the organisation resource allocators to ensure that Scrum Development Teams are composed of members with all the necessary skills for the development all of the time.
We expect Scrum Development Teams to be self-organising, cross-functional and work in a collaborative manner; traditional HR systems are an impediment to this goal.
Solution:
The Scrum Master must work with the HR department to make them more Agile. There is a good article from the Agile Alliance, Practicing Agility in Human Resources, to help with this HR coaching.
Solution:
It is not possible to change an organisations whole culture overnight!
It is recommended that the Scrum Master, during the early stages of an organisational transformation, focus their ‘culture changing’ efforts on the stakeholders directly involved with a single product development.
Some may be sceptical so the Scrum Master may have to spend a significant amount of mentoring time with them.
Even though the Scrum Master may explain the implications of Scrum to sceptical stakeholders (and developers in some cases), some people do not believe until they see the results. Be prepared to answer all the sceptical people’s questions but do not let them introduce non-Agile practices.
Solution:
Do not hold meetings!
Do not have Agendas!
When more than two people are required to discuss a topic or make decisions, hold a facilitated workshop. Although some say that a facilitated workshop should have an Agenda, the word ‘Agenda’ still indicates to some that a facilitated workshop is just another name for a meeting. Instead, have clear workshop objectives which are tightly focused around a single topic so that all workshop invitees are motivated to attend on time.
For those people who still consistently turn up late, the Scrum Master must individually mentor the person as to why it is important for them to be on time:
This results in ‘blocked work’ and will probably be ‘reported’ during the daily Scrum.
Solution:
The Scrum Master, as the Risks and Issues manager, must work with the affected developer to resolve the problem and if the resolution is not successful, he/she must escalate the problem to the Product Owner (PO) who may have to use their seniority and company politics to resolve the problem themselves.
Remember that the PO is solely responsible for ensuring the best business value emanates from the product development; blocked work reduces business value.
The suppliers may or may not be using Agile or specifically Scrum for their development work.
The other teams may deliver their parts late with respect to the plans or the delivered part may not be of suitable quality.
Solution:
The process for dealing with Supplier Issues will probably be different between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ suppliers.
In both cases, if resolution is not possible and given that there is Programme Management in place, the Scrum Master should escalate the problem to the PO and facilitate the problem resolution with the Programme Management.
A longer-term solution to minimise Supplier Issues is for the organisation to have all ‘internal’ suppliers using Agile techniques and only use Agile Contracts for engaging ‘external’ suppliers; you can find more information about Agile Contracts at Agile Contracts or Agile Statement of Work - Must-Haves and Agile Contracts - The Foundation of Successful Partnering.
It is often tempting to see the immediate symptoms of a problem and fix things so that these symptoms disappear only to see different symptoms appear later for a related problem.
To successfully solve problems, we must get to the root cause of the problem; so-called Root Cause Analysis (RCA).
The following are popular techniques used to carry out RCA:
Brainstorming the RCA relies on several people producing their thoughts and feeding off other people’s thoughts in order to converge on the probable root cause of the problem.
It is a relatively unstructured technique for RCA and it can be difficult to see the root cause amongst a great deal of data.
The 5-Whys technique is possibly the simplest RCA technique; it is a little like an annoying 5-year old asking question after question to the answers you give them. Essentially, the RCA workshop facilitator keeps asking “why” until an apparent problem root cause is discovered.
Generally, a minimum of 5 ‘Why?’ questions are asked, although sometimes more or less may be needed. For example:
This example could be extended to discover why the vehicle had not been maintained properly; the root cause could be that the need for regular servicing was unknown; the questions go on until the group agree that a fixable cause has been found.
Flowcharting can help discover problems about a process in a graphical manner; a group of people affected by the problem will chart the supposed ‘As-Is’ process to see where the problem has arisen:
A Fishbone or Ishikawa Diagram is most useful when the “5 Whys” technique is considered to be too basic.
In a Fishbone Diagram, the various causes are grouped into categories, with arrows in the image indicating how the causes flow toward the problem; categories used in the diagram are not pre-defined but common categories include equipment, processes or methods, measurements, materials, environment and people.
This type of RCA seeks to understand the possible causes by asking questions such as “what actually happened,” “when,” “where,” “why,” “how,” and “so what” until a possible cause is identified and the consequences and significance is investigated further for each category; for example:
Figure 8 - Example Fishbone Diagram
An Affinity Diagram is a tool that gathers large amounts of language data (ideas, opinions, issues) and organizes them into groupings based on their natural relationships. The Affinity process is often used to group ideas generated by Brainstorming.
See Affinity Diagram for more information
The Scrum framework, as described in the Scrum Guide, is focused on one product development Scrum Team. However, in many large organisations, products can be large with various diverse aspects that make up the product that could not be developed by one Scrum Team; they require a programme of product development teams.
There are a few ‘Scaling Scrum’ frameworks that address using multiple Scrum Teams to develop one product, the more well-known of such frameworks are as follows:
LeSS provides 2 Scrum Scaling Frameworks
Both frameworks follow the same ‘rules’:
In LeSS, all Teams are in a common Sprint to deliver a common shippable product, every Sprint.
The following is how the LeSS frameworks run Sprints:
Team members self-manage to decide their division of Product Backlog Items. Team
members also discuss opportunities to find shared work and cooperate, especially for related items.
The key purpose is to decide which teams are likely to implement which items and therefore select those items for later in-depth single-team PBR.
It is also a chance to increase alignment with the Product Owner and all teams.
For the purpose of inspecting the product increment and new items, consider a “bazaar” or “science fair” style: a large room with multiple areas, each staffed by team members, where the items developed by teams are shown and discussed.
The maximum duration is 45 minutes per week of Sprint.
It includes the Product Owner, Scrum Masters and rotating representatives from each Team.
See LeSS Framework for more information about LeSS.
The DAD process decision framework provides a cohesive approach to agile solution delivery; it is defined as:
“The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) decision process framework is a people-first, learning-oriented hybrid Agile approach to IT solution delivery.
It has a risk-value delivery lifecycle, is goal-driven, is enterprise aware and is scalable.”
DAD extends Scrum with proven strategies from Agile Modelling (AM), Extreme Programming (XP), Unified Process (UP), Kanban, Lean Software Development, Outside-In Development (OID) and several other methods.
DAD doesn’t prescribe a single lifecycle because it recognizes that one strategy does not fit all.
DAD includes advice about the technical practices such as those from Extreme Programming (XP) as well as the modelling, documentation, and governance strategies
missing from both Scrum and XP.
See Going Beyond Scrum for more information about DAD.
“S@S is a framework within which networks of Scrum teams operating consistently with the Scrum Guide can address complex adaptive problems, while creatively delivering products of the highest possible value”
The S@S framework is based on the ‘Scrum of Scrums” (SoS) concept but the SoS becomes a Team within its own right and coordinates the work of several Scrum Teams; equivalent to a Programme Management Team.
For large multi-programme developments, The SoS is scaled via a “Scrum of Scrums of Scrums” (SoSoS) Team.
For coordinating the whole Agile Enterprise there is an “Executive Action Team” (EAT):
For more information about S@S, see The Scrum at Scale Guide
The Enterprise Scrum initiative was formed to give a definition of what “Business Agility” is:
“Business Agility is the ability to adapt quickly and effectively to all forms of change to deliver maximum value and customer experience”
Enterprise Scrum provides a way to implement Business Agility; it is a generic framework to implement Agile Management for just about anything.
The framework consists of the following:
All Enterprise Agile personnel must act according to Agile Values and Agile Mindset to create an Agile Team with an Agile Culture.
See Enterprise Scrum Business Agility for more information about Enterprise Scrum.
The senior management of some (if not many) large organisations, having accepted the ideas behind Agile and knowing that the one-team Scrum framework is inadequate for their organisation, try to go straight from a traditional organisation to a ‘Scaled Scrum’ organisation.
Those that have tried this have hit severe cultural problems and perceive that ‘Agile does not do what it says on the tin’.
Implementing the cultural changes required for single-Team Scrum is difficult enough; the problems with trying to implement the cultural changes required for ‘Scaled Scrum” are exponentially more difficult.
The following is advice about when not to scale Scrum:
In the early stages, you will reap greater benefits if you focus on developing the core agile principles and Scrum Values
Work on developing a good backlog, meeting commitments, reaching a standard velocity, and achieving high-quality output.
Additionally, starting small creates excitement, focuses on quick wins and learning more nimbly.
This may seem like a natural point in the journey where you may start to ask whether you are ready to scale.
Before taking that leap, it is strongly recommended to optimise your current Scrum teams and Agile processes; really concentrate on strengthening your base in order to maximize throughput and ROI—instead of trying to build the product-development processes that you will need for Scrum at scale.
If you are at this point in your Agile journey, take a look at implementing test-driven development, continuous integration and deployment (not included in the Scrum Guide) and meeting commitments on a regular cadence.
The transition from team-level Scrum processes to an enterprise framework requires a significant investment in change management. The move should be well thought-out and cautiously approached. If you have specific problems that scaling can solve, lay them out with an advisor and see if the journey is worth the investment.
When you’re ready, know that enterprise frameworks are tried and true tools that have delivered tremendous benefits for many organizations but you have to be at the right point in your journey to take advantage of these tools.
When a product is being developed by multiple Scrum Teams it is recommended that there be 1 Product Backlog (PB) for that all the Teams draw from to produce their own Sprint Backlogs.
It is probable that 1 Team may be dependent on an output from another Team before they can develop a particular Product Backlog Item (PBI); for example:
“As a customer
I need to pay for my goods/services
So that the company will send them to me”
Clearly, Team B has a dependency on Team A such that Team B cannot start their part of the payment functionality until Team A has completed their part.
When Scaling Scrum, the aim of Release Planning is to minimise the inter-team dependencies; it is improbable that all inter-team dependencies can be eliminated.
The following are some of the ways that inter-team dependencies could be handled:
MMF is the group of features that make up the MVP.
The Release Plan may be developed using the following steps:
For the payment example above, you may end up with a Release Plan Board and proposed Team Sprint plans that looks something like:
Possible Release and Sprints Plans
You can see that all Release MMF are planned to be finished by the end of Sprint 2 leaving Sprint 3 to cater for any overruns.
With the advent of Component-Based Development (CBD), some organised their development teams into Component Teams and Product Teams who ‘glued’ together the necessary components.
If this continued into an Agile environment, then each ‘product’ development team would be dependent on separate component teams and the required coordination would be an onerous task.
In an Agile environment it is recommended to have ‘Feature Teams’; 1 Team should be responsible for the end-to-end development of all of a Feature’s User Stories.
This does not preclude the reuse of components; part of the organisation’s Design Strategy would require that a separate (possibly non-Agile) Component Management Team (CMT) reviews the output of the Development Teams to see if there is any functionality that could be componentised; the CMT are responsible for componentising the functionality and maintaining a Component Library.
Before writing any code, the Development Team search the Component Library for any components that would be useful.
Component Teams
Feature Teams
When scaling Scrum, many of the Scrum Events/Ceremonies need to be run with all programme Teams and, sometimes, all product stakeholders present.
This obviously requires a larger than normal space but the format used is important as well to maximise the value of the ‘workshops’; for example, for a Sprint Review where several Teams are ‘show-casing’ what they have produced, it would be boring for the stakeholders just to sit through multiple presentations and demonstrations especially if there are features being reviewed that they have no immediate interest in.
Scaled Scrum Events/Ceremonies are best run if everyone is co-located or can travel to the Event. This is not always possible or economical for organisations that have programme Development Teams and stakeholders scattered around the world.
The overall Programme Scrum Event process is similar for both non-co-located and co-located Events:
For non-co-located Teams and stakeholders, use should be made of tele-conferencing and video-conferencing technology.
Scheduling of combined and ‘break-out’ sessions can be difficult if the Teams and stakeholders are in widely different time zones; what would normally be a half-day Event may have to become a full day or even a day and a half.
For a co-located programme and stakeholders, it is essential that the ‘main room’ is big enough to hold all participants and is equipped with white boards and flip charts. If the room is really large, then a big screen and PA system may be required
The ‘break-out’ sessions may be held in the same room; some or all may be held in readily accessible smaller rooms.
The detail of how the ‘big-room’ Events may be run and facilitated vary but the 2 most common are Open Space and World Cafe.
The following are how the ‘standard’ Overall Programme Scrum Event Process may be configured for specific Events:
For one-Team Scrum we would only plan a Sprint at the beginning of a Sprint wherever we are in the Release cycle but for a programme, the stakeholders will need to have some idea what will be in the Release and the Teams need to produce outline Sprint Plans so that dependencies between Teams may be discovered, minimized and planned for.
Before the joint planning session, the Programme Manager will have worked with the relevant stakeholders to set a Release Goal and select potential features for the Release ordered by business value.
At the start the start of the Event the Programme Manager may allocate potential Release features to Teams or the Teams can volunteer for them.
The Teams, aided by relevant stakeholders, will go into concurrent ‘break-out’ sessions to decompose the features into User Stories and estimate the total effort required for each feature; this activity should be timeboxed to reduce the risk of the Teams going into too much detail.
The Teams will come together to see each other’s list of User Stories, to identify dependencies and distribute User Stories so that the effort is spread evenly between Teams.
The Teams then go back into ‘break-outs’ and produce an outline Sprint plan for each Sprint in the Release.
Finally, everybody comes together to produce/update the Release Plan Board with the outline Team Sprint Plans to ensure that the highest value User Stories will be developed first and that inter-Team dependencies have been catered for.
Some Programme Teams hold their individual Sprint Planning in the same space but separately and then ‘compare notes’ toward the end of the session to ensure that dependencies have been identified and catered for.
Some co-located Programme Scrum Teams hold the daily Scrums at the same time and in the same space but separately, then each team summarises any highlights to the other Teams.
Other organisations hold their Team daily Scrums as ‘normal’ and the Scrum Masters have their own ‘daily Scrum of Scrums’ at a convenient time.
A programme Sprint Review involves all Teams and all relevant stakeholders so the large space is needed for a co-located programme.
The workshop starts with the Programme Manager summarising what has gone on in the Sprint then the stakeholders attend as many Team demonstrations and hands-on trying of functionality as ‘break-outs’, held either in the same space or readily accessible ‘break-out’ rooms.
There are usually white boards and/or flip-charts available for stakeholders to make notes about things that they would like to be discussed toward the end of the Review when everybody comes together again.
The final ‘all-together’ session also includes the Programme Manager asking the stakeholders if there are any features/User Stories that need to be added to the Product Backlog; if there is anything that needs to be deleted from the Product Backlog and if the current ordering is still viable.
For non-co-located Teams and Stakeholders, the individual ‘break-outs’ can be run as concurrent timeboxed ‘webinars’ at scheduled times throughout the Review session; each Team running several ‘webinars’ to allow as many stakeholders the chance to ‘login’.
Although each Programme Scrum Team may hold their own Sprint Retrospective, it is important that a Programme Sprint Retrospective is held.
A Programme Sprint Retrospective follows the Overall Programme Scrum Event Process described above; the opening session is used to identify the good and bad things about how the programme is running and choosing the most important issues that need to be addressed.
Each ‘break-out’ session focuses on one area of issues and any members for any Team attempt to find the root cause of the issue and devise resolution plans.
There may be an interim coming together to discuss progress so far and maybe add to or subtract from the list of issues to be discussed in a second ‘break-out’ session.
During the final coming together, the results of the ‘break-out’ sessions are discussed and plans are devised to resolve the most important issues.
Scrum Team productivity is difficult, if not impossible, to measure for a single Team and definitely impossible when comparing productivity of different Teams.
The metric that Scrum Teams usually use to help them plan Sprints is the Development Team velocity; some ‘managers’ believe that Team productivity is directly linked to Team velocity; the higher the velocity, the higher the productivity.
Nothing can be further from the truth!
Velocity is Team, product and time specific and should only be used to aid Sprint planning.
The value that a Development Team is delivering per Sprint cannot be used as a measure of productivity either; by its very nature, a Team will deliver higher value at the start of the product development because they will be working on higher value User Stories.
Increasing Scrum Team productivity can only come from ensuring that the fundamental ‘rules’ and ‘values’ of Agile and Scrum are being followed.
The following are the main areas of organisational change that will help improve Scrum Team productivity:
“Respondents report that senior management sponsorship and support is far and away the most important factor in adopting Scrum.”
AND
“… though senior management support is considered critical in Scrum adoption, only 7% of respondents reported that as visible in their organizations.”
The need for senior management Agile awareness and involvement in product development is that Scrum Teams are not isolated ‘islands’ in the organisation, they have to interact with other parts of the organisation that may resist changes to their work practices for the Scrum Teams to be productive.
The motivation for these other organisation parts to adapt must come from senior management.
As an example, an Agile Team was formed to implement a new process to get connecting passengers from one aircraft to another, especially if the inbound flight was delayed. The new process involved the development of a new IT system and the team planned to release increments of the new software monthly.
However, when it came to the first release, the team discovered that there was an organisational process that required 2 months before ‘desktop ready’ software could be made ‘live’.
The problem was resolved eventually by allowing the team to have a ‘fast-track’ release process but the resolution took a month of discussions with the management of 3 other divisions within the organisation.
When an Agile/Scrum transition starts, it is important to discover all the stakeholders, at whatever level in the organisation, that can influence the early team’s productivity and ensure that they understand the possible implications to them and their subordinates of the Agile transition.
Mark Levison suggests one way of coping with the necessary senior management ‘education’ in his blog, Taking Organizational Improvement with Scrum Seriously; he proposes a ‘Change Management’ Scrum Team to develop the organisational change product.
The Team members in Agile have all the skills needed to complete a product development; the Team size is generally constant for the whole product development.
If we take Tuckman’s group dynamic model, all groups of people go through ‘forming’, ‘storming’ and ‘norming’ ‘phases’ before the group becomes ‘performing’; it can take a significant amount of time before the ‘performing’ stage is reached.
It therefore follows, that once a Team has reached the ‘performing’ stage, we should keep the Team together after the product development is finished; the ability to work well together as a team is more important than any individual skills.
Keeping teams together can be characterised as ‘bring projects to teams’.
This has 2 possible effects on individual team members:
The team must be allowed to do their own estimation and set their own ‘comfortable’ Sprint capacity; the Team members must collectively believe that a Sprint plan will work at the end of Sprint Planning.
There are still many established ‘Agile’ organisations where it is normal for Development Teams to receive extra work during the Sprint from different people, most of which does not contribute to meeting the Sprint Goal.
To be productive, a Development Team need to keep focused on the Sprint Goal, distractions reduce product development productivity.
Most of this extra work can be categorised as ‘fire-fighting’; there are 2 approaches to resolving this ‘problem’:
Not only is this unreasonable, because the effort for each SBI is only an estimate, but it also leaves no room to implement any of the improvements that were identified during the previous Sprint Retrospective.
A reasonable agreement must be made between the PO and the Development Team for an agreed number of ‘Improvement’ Items to be added to the Sprint Backlog with a high priority.
Finally, there is a good article by Łukasz Krzyżek about the Scrum Master as a Change Agent for the organisation.
As a reminder, the 5 Scrum Values are:
As a Scrum Master, you will remind the Development Team occasionally of the Values and probably use the Values when trying to find the cause of team impediments.
However, you are also a member of the Scrum Team so you should also embody the Values in your own work.
It is advised that Scrum Masters carry out their own 5 Values ‘retrospective’ at regular intervals to see if any improvements could be made.
Some Scrum Masters include get the Development Team members to evaluate them to gain an insight as to how others see them.
A good technique to use for the evaluation is to use a Radar Chart:
By plotting the results for different dates, a ‘history of improvement’ can be seen.
This technique may be used for each Development Team member as part of a Sprint Retrospective.
To be a successful Scrum Master, you need to be motivated to become one.
There are many theories and learned papers about motivation and all agree that it is a complex subject; two people who are ‘successful’ in one field of expertise may have different driving factors.
Also, what does successful mean? Is it being seen as successful to other people or is it believing we are successful to ourselves. You can see that it gets really complicated if our own definition of success is to be seen as successful by other people.
There have been cases where someone who is seen by ‘the world’ as highly successful, does not believe in themselves that they are successful.
In our professional lives, it is our own fundamental driving factors that inform our decisions about how we do our job.
If you have not already examined your fundamental driving factors, a good visual tool to help you choose is Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs:
The Basic Needs in Figure 15 are why we get out of bed in the morning and go to work; if you are a Scrum Master, those needs have been met.
The third level of needs has to do with the instinct of human beings to be tribal; are we accepted by a group of people that we would want to belong to; family, team, organisation, country etc. You can have different motivations to different groups; for example, you could be motivated to be part of the worldwide Scrum Master community and be indifferent to your nationality.
The fourth level of needs is tied closely to the third in that if you have achieved ‘membership’ of your chosen tribe, it is probable that you feel accomplished. However, you may want to be seen as having prestige in that tribe; so, you have your Scrum Master certification and your search for prestige, in the eyes of others, is why you wish to become an A-CSM.
It is at the top level in Maslow’s Hierarchy, Self-Actualisation, that an individual can feel that they ‘have made it’.
Our fundamental driving factors will change depending at which level we are in the Hierarchy; if we are at the bottom, then the driving factor is to get some money, or otherwise, to feel safe; if we are at the top, then the driving factor is how to stay at the top.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of possible fundamental driving factors:
Not that being a Scrum Master means you control the team but it does mean you have control of how you go about helping the team become a high-performance team.
If you wish to be a successful Scrum Master and you wish others to see you as a successful Scrum Master, you need to analyse your own fundamental driving factors in order to decide how you will go about becoming one; be proactive and not reactive.
See “The 5 most powerful self-beliefs that ignite human behavior”.
Conflict arises when a group of people (2 or more) have different goals when choosing a desired outcome or how to achieve a desired outcome. If you do a search for ‘the different ways to respond to conflict’, you will probably get in the order of 200 million hits.
The following are some of the more common ways of responding to conflict:
Achieving consensus requires that all the parties in a dispute state the reasons for their position while the others listen; in this manner everybody’s goals will be amended based on new information; for example, one person’s goal may be based on a short-term reason while another’s is based on long-term concerns.
There may be risk involved in either goal; the idea is to come to an agreed decision based on the lowest perceived risk.
On the other hand, they may feel powerless and helpless and their involvement will make no difference at all and find it easier to avoid the conflict.
It is generally agreed that the best response to conflict is consensus whilst the worst is denial.
There are some behaviours that escalate a conflict into a self-sustaining way of life; these behaviours are dysfunctional and destructive.
Destructive conflict in any one situation may its roots in the outcome of previous destructive conflict where one party may feel slighted or not listened to; the actual cause becomes irrelevant; the slighted party is set on ‘revenge’ and their approach to subsequent conflict becomes irrational.
Destructive conflicts are more likely to occur when behaviours come from rigid, competitive systems.
As a Scrum Master, when facilitating any workshop, you will come across conflict; what you must look out for are the signs that the conflict may become destructive and attempt to ensure that the conflict becomes positive. The following are some of the signs of destructive conflict:
Such behaviour must be curtailed as soon as possible; one way would be to move the focus of the conversation from the people in conflict to other workshop participants to gauge their opinion of each side of the argument.
If, as a workshop facilitator, you come across this situation, be sure to take time to ask the ‘non-verbal’ participants their opinion of what the dominant person is saying; they may all say that they agree but you must gauge that agreement; are they ‘agreeing’ because they feel intimidated by the dominant person.
There are different reasons for this behaviour, both of which are destructive
The question ‘so you want to do it this way’, if said in a calm measured tone, is probably a request for clarification, that is a positive response; however, if the question is said with a raised and highly critical tone of voice, it indicates aggression and an attempt to belittle the original speaker; this is destructive.
The reason for the belittling tone could be a request for more information and it is just the person’s personality that makes them use that tone; it could be an attempt to belittle. In either case, as the facilitator, ask the original to give further information or detail about why they hold the opinion that they do.
If someone is quiet and not contributing to the conversation, as a facilitator, you must ask them directly what their opinions are. If you get a negative response ie ‘Don’t know’ or ‘Don’t care’, then the other workshop participants will possibly not get the full information to make the ‘right’ decision and/or become uncomfortable with the quiet person’s presence; the quiet person will be equally demotivated to implement whatever decision is made.
This situation is a tricky one to overcome; one way would be to talk to the person privately, during a workshop break to discover their true reason for their seeming lack of interest. They may genuinely not have anything to contribute, in which case you should suggest that they leave the workshop, or you must try to motivate the person to contribute.
Little consensus exists on how to define servant leadership. Instead, studies on servant leadership provide loose descriptions on what servant leaders are, the behaviours they show to their followers and the impact on the organisation.
To encapsulate the various aspects of servant leadership, a recent literature review provided the following definition;
"Servant leadership is an other-oriented approach to leadership manifested through one-on-one prioritizing of follower individual needs and interests, and outward reorienting of their concern for self towards concern for others within the organization and the larger community."
Eva, Nathan; Robin, Mulyadi; Sendjaya, Sen; van Dierendonck, Dirk; Liden, Robert C. (2018-07). "Servant Leadership: A systematic review and call for future research"
So what does this mean? Let us look at the definitions of the 2 words:
It follows then, that a servant-leader is someone who ‘own’s the vision/goal, shares that with their followers who work out how to achieve the goal and helps their followers when needed.
Robert K. Greenleaf coined the phrase servant leader and noted that a person whose first inclination is towards serving others, and then leading, was quite different from someone who wanted to lead; a servant leader thinks about others first instead of self. He/she is more concerned about the benefit and growth of others rather than putting their own desires or goals first.
putting people first, communicating skilfully, being a systems thinker
