Developing a Sprint Goal

The sprint goal is used to help focus the Scrum Team on the objectives of the sprint, the higher purpose of why the sprint is necessary. The Scrum Guide has this to say about creating a sprint goal:

"After the Development Team forecasts the Product Backlog items it will deliver in the Sprint, the Scrum Team crafts a Sprint Goal. The Sprint Goal is an objective that will be met within the Sprint through the implementation of the Product Backlog, and it provides guidance to the Development Team on why it is building the Increment.

By the end of the Sprint Planning Meeting, the Development Team should be able to explain to the Product Owner and Scrum Master how it intends to work as a self-organizing team to accomplish the Sprint Goal and create the anticipated Increment."

My team's Sprint Goal was, at times, essentially a summation of the user stories but the better Sprint Goals in my mind were those that served as a milestone for the development team, the customers, the business, or any combination of these. For example a Sprint Goal for the first sprint of a newly formed Scrum Team might be, "Show that we can add value to the customer using scrum." To achieve this goal the team would need to complete at least one story. You'll note that this Sprint Goal has two parts: one part is about adding value for the customer and the second part is about the Scrum Team realizing their own potential to deliver value using scrum.

In order to keep the development team motivated throughout the sprint,  I would suggest helping the team find a higher purpose and develop a metaphor to describe that purpose. Look for the benefit or who benefits from the sprint and coach the team to use this information in crafting their Sprint Goal.

During the daily scrum, I would ask the development team if any impediments might put achieving the Sprint Goal at risk. I would discontinue this once the development team themselves began alluding to the Sprint Goal in the daily scrum as they planned the day’s activities. My intent was to re-enforce the Sprint Goal as the primary focus rather than the stories, which served as a means to achieving the Sprint Goal.

The Sprint Goal and Shorter Sprints

If the sprint length is short, one or two weeks, then the Sprint Goal might not have the bite or grab the imagination as firmly as when sprints are longer. It could be that by the time the Scrum Team fully embraces the Sprint Goal, the sprint is over. The probable issue here is two-fold: 1), the development team, being technical in nature, will tend to associate themselves with the work rather than the reasons for that work, and 2), the Scrum Team may not be spending a lot of time developing the Sprint Goal for shorter sprints thinking time is at a premium.

As scrum master, you can encourage the Scrum Team to think about the bigger picture and understand the benefits and who benefits from the forthcoming sprint. The length of the sprint fades into the background as the team concentrates on these benefits. The amount of time taken to develop the Sprint Goal is rewarded by the development team gaining insight to the customer's, end user's, or business's needs, and satisfying these needs or moving toward the satisfaction of these needs is the real intent of the sprint.

Technical Sprint Goal

When the Scrum Team first formed up, Sprint Goals tended to be a reflection of the specific stories in the sprint, that is, they tended to focus on the technical nature of the sprint rather than the beneficiaries. This is most probably due to the former way software development was run using waterfall techniques. In a waterfall environment, the development team was not always privy to the reasons behind the requirements and the product owner, often a former BA, product manager, or project manager, hasn't yet learned the benefits of having development team understand the driving force or purpose behind the requirements.

In this scenario the product is the principal beneficiary of the effort rather than any customer, user, or business. The scrum master needs to show the product owner, and quite probably the business, that having the development team involved with the customers, end users, and the business is necessary to getting a better product, increasing the number of customers, and growing the business. The development team needs to understand the customer, end user, and business so better for them to put themselves in their position and visualize the customers', end users', and business's point of view.

Unfocused Sprint

Sometimes the product owner has prioritized the product backlog to do several features or functions at the same time rather than concentrating on one at a time. This probably is another throw-back to the waterfall days when all developers were kept busy on several aspects of the project at the same time. The result is that everything is "in progress" but nothing is "done".

 

There are a couple of reasons that this approach can be considered flawed. The first is this kind of approach can be construed as going against the agile principle, "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software." By working several features at the same time over several sprints, the team runs the risk of not delivering value at the end of each sprint. A customer may not be particularly thrilled being at sprint review after sprint review without seeing a completed feature.

 

The second potential flaw is the lack of flexibility to release early with only a partial set of planned functionality completed. For example, if a planned release has 5 new features, it's entirely possible for the business to release the product with only 3 of these completed if it can be determined that the product in its current state achieves "product/market fit." In other words, the cost of completing the remaining 2 features is greater than the perceived value of the product if these 2 were completed. If the product owner elects to do all 5 features in parallel, then the opportunity to release early, and begin generating revenue sooner, is lost.

 

Not Meeting the Sprint Goal

 

The Scrum Guide states that if the Sprint Goal becomes "obsolete", then the product owner may cancel the sprint. Since this implies a sudden, massive shift away from the perceived business value of the work in the sprint, this will be a very rare occurrence.

 

It's entirely possible for a development team to not meet the Sprint Goal but this doesn't mean the team has failed or that the sprint should be cancelled. What this most likely means is an unknown factor has made itself apparent during the sprint causing a slow-down of progress or a change in direction regarding design or technology. Not meeting the Sprint Goal is something that happens to all Scrum Teams and shouldn't be taken as a personal team failure but rather as a call to understand the root causes and correct them. Usually missing a Sprint Goal is due to an insufficient understanding of the work pulled into the sprint or, with less experienced Scrum Teams, over-committing and taking on more work than the team can handle.

 

Summary

Select a Sprint Goal that focuses on the beneficiaries of the sprint using the work as a guide. As a team, try to develop a metaphor to describe what the objective of the sprint is. Avoid the temptation to develop a Sprint Goal that reflects the work, i.e. product, over the beneficiaries.

With shorter sprints the Sprint Goal may not have enough impact on the team. The team should spend the time necessary to develop a Sprint Goal that adds meaning to the sprint even if the sprint is one week long. All sprints, regardless of length, should add value to the customer, end user, or business and the work in the sprint is a means toward achieving this value.

Try and keep a tight focus on the sprint and Sprint Goal. Working one feature at a time can get value to the customer quicker than working several features at once. It is better to have one feature "done" than to have several features "in progress" at the end of the sprint.

Do not get overly anxious if the Sprint Goal will be or is missed and don't be tempted to abort the sprint because of it. Use the sprint retrospective to analyse the root causes and make the appropriate corrections for the next sprint.

 

 

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Agile Project Manger or Scrum Master?

I find that there's a tremendous amount of prejudice against certain words in the Scrum community and "manager" is near the top. A business can and will give their roles any title they feel is appropriate. I would bet the farm that in some companies, the Scrum Master role is more aligned to a Project Manager of old and that Agile Project Manager role is more aligned to the Scrum Guide’s definition of the Scrum Master. So far no help, right?

Most businesses that are or will be transitioning to Scrum will have an Agile champion on board to guide the transition. I was this person at my previous company and after some time the role of Scrum Master was identified and added to HR’s list. However, before that happened, the person in the Scrum Team coaching and helping the developers and product owner was known as “Scrum Master”. This happened due to training and coaching the software and product management departments received during the transition to Scrum. The internal view was that the servant-leader of a development team was called “Scrum Master”. The external view of the role as projected by the HR department, possibly following 10 – 20 years of tradition, might have still have the role listed as “Project Manager” but now with the added term “Agile” plopped in front. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise as the adoption of Scrum starts within the software department and will only spread once the successes due to the application of Scrum are recognised. As the Agile champion, my focus was on the software department and not HR, (in the beginning). After a couple months and Scrum had an obvious foothold in the company, efforts to re-align HR roles and role descriptions (Scrum Master, Development Team Member, Product Owner) began.

 

As a practicing Scrum Master and I saw a job ad that said, “Agile Project Manager”, I would apply with the knowledge that the role is most likely that of a Scrum Master for a company in transition (or possibly stuck in transition). I might find out otherwise at the interview but that’s the point of the interview: the prospective employer and prospective employee determine if there exists a common understanding of expectations and responsibilities surrounding the role. Some may see this as waste but as the interviewee, I see interviews as a learning experience even when the ultimate outcome is no job.

One of the responsibilities of the Scrum Master in the Scrum Guide is, “Leading and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption”. This is where it can be argued that the Scrum Master is charged with aligning the roles and role descriptions in HR with the roles and descriptions found in the Scrum Guide. If the Scrum Master(s) are unsuccessful in doing this today, then it means they try again tomorrow, and the next, and so on. As long as the internal application of Scrum roles is correctly aligned with the Scrum Guide, then this view external of the Scrum Team might be an annoyance but not necessarily a terminal problem.

 

Summary

 

In the final analysis the Agile coach and Scrum Masters need to pick their battles with an eye on impact and results. Getting management and the Scrum Team following the Scrum framework is to me, job one. Pulling the rest of the corporate structure in line with Scrum role descriptions i.e., HR and management, is of secondary concern in my view.

 

 

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How To Recognize A Self-Organizing Team During Sprint Planning

As a Scrum Master, one of  the ways you serve the development team is by coaching them in self-organization.  Several [hundred] definitions of self-organizing exist on the web but I'll use the Scrum Guide and add a point or two.

"Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team. ... No one (not even the Scrum Master) tells the Development Team how to turn Product Backlog into Increments of potentially releasable functionality." - Schwaber, Ken and Sutherland, Jeff. "The Scrum Guide", October 2011.

The Scrum Guide definition focuses on the development team understanding and undertaking the work they do during a sprint. The Scrum Guide specifically wants the development team to control how they do the work of the sprint. I would add to that definition two points: the development team acts as their own technical (not line) manager and the development team displays strong professional bearing, unity, and are respectful of others. This manifests itself with the development team understanding and anticipating the technical actions required to implement scrum in the most efficient and expedient manner and the development team working very closely with the product owner (PO) throughout the project.

 

Self-Organizing During the Sprint Planning Meeting

 

The Scrum Guide suggests time-boxing the sprint planning meeting at 2-hours for each week of the pending sprint but as the development team becomes more self-organizing, the amount of time necessary for planning should greatly decrease. The two main reasons sprint planning can become shorter are:

1. The development team has a very good understanding of PBI's coming into the planning meeting primarily due to helping the PO develop the PBI's and conducting product backlog grooming sessions.
2. The development team and PO work very closely together, discussing customer wants and desires, customer requirements, and customer expectations throughout the project.

Sprint Planning Meeting Part I

 

The first half of the sprint planning meeting has the PO presenting the ordered product backlog to the development team and the development team forecasting what they can do in the upcoming sprint. In an ideal first half, the self-organizing development team "pulls" off the top x items from the backlog the PO presented and adds these to the upcoming sprint. The development team and PO have already discussed the PBI's during previous grooming sessions but the PO may have made some changes since. The development team and PO review the selected items and any changes made by the PO since the last grooming session. The development team and PO then conjure up a sprint goal and the first half of the sprint planning meeting is done, probably in less than 20-minutes.

 

Sprint Planning Meeting Part II

 

The second half of the sprint planning meeting has the development team figuring out how to deliver the PBI's for the sprint. The self-organizing development team will identify enough tasks for the first few days of the sprint. The development team may re-negotiate with the PO if they determine that they cannot do all the PBI's in their present form (i.e. a need to reduce scope) or the development team may find they can do more PBI's and "pull" in these from the product backlog. The second half of the sprint planning meeting now concludes and the sprint starts.

 

The elapse time for the sprint planning meeting should be less than an hour, under 30-minutes for a two week sprint, when the development team takes on the responsibility to groom the product backlog and understand PBI's to the extent that these PBI's are "sprint ready" i.e., ready to be worked with only minimum review and recap.

 

A Clue That The Development Team Isn't Fully Self-Organizing

 

During the sprint planning meeting, the product owner pushes the requirements onto a "dazed" development team.

 

Picture a sprint planning meeting with a team only recently introduced to agile and scrum. In the first half of this meeting, the PO is presenting product backlog items to the development team. A development team member asks why a story [feature, requirement] is in the upcoming sprint. The PO and development team spend considerable time discussing the necessity and merit of each PBI for the upcoming sprint. In this scenario, there's no indication the development team understands the product backlog items and are merely reacting to what the PO has presented.

 

There are a few reasons this kind of behavior might be present:

1. The development team is in command & control mode and doesn't feel it's their place to "pull" work,
2. the product owner is in command & control mode and feels the need to "manage" the development team,
3. the development team is not grooming the product backlog with the product owner, or
4. the development team doesn't understand the product backlog is ordered.

It can be the hard for a development team used to command & control to become self-organizing, especially if the team is transitioning from waterfall. Similarly, if the PO is formally a product manager or project manager, they may have difficulties letting go of the command & control aspects of their former roles. Either of these two is likely to occur and have much the same solution, the scrum master needs to train these people on the philosophy of agile, specifically agile principles:

 

• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing Teams.
• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

 

These agile principles coupled with the rules and practices of scrum outlined in the Scrum Guide, can start the journey towards a self-organizing team.

 

The third reason the development team is not involved may be the team isn't working with the product owner to groom the product backlog. Product backlog grooming helps to develop an understanding of the requirements both technically and from a business value (customer) point of view. The scrum master should ensure the development team and PO do grooming and may need to facilitate the initial grooming sessions to make sure this happens. The scrum master can encourage the PO and development team to work together developing PBI's for the customer requirements, develop the acceptance criteria for the customer requirements, and to discuss any risks or issues associated with the customer requirements.

 

The forth reason a development team isn't "pulling" in work from the product backlog could be they don't quite understand how the product backlog is structured. The Scrum Guide states that the product backlog has the attributes description, order, and estimate and "is often ordered by value, risk, priority, and necessity." Although the PO can decide how to order the product backlog, the product backlog is not the private domain of the PO. There should be no secrets or surprises in the product backlog. The scrum master can help maintain the transparency of the product backlog by facilitating product backlog grooming sessions and by encouraging the PO and development team to break down and write the more detailed customer requirements together.

 

Summary

 

One of the ways the scrum master serves the development team is to coach them in self-organizing behavior. The development team will become more self-organizing as time passes and one way to see this progress is by observing the way the sprint planning meeting runs. As the development team becomes more self-organizing, one effect should be the swiftness of the sprint planning meeting. This will be primarily due to the PO and development team working in close harmony together as customer requirements are developed, broken down with details added, and the PO and development team sharing a common understanding of the value of each "sprint ready" requirement.

 

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Measuring the Success Of The Scrum Master

The Scrum Guide states, "[T]he Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted." Scrum is defined in the Scrum Guide as follows: "Scrum (n): A framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value." So, one could logically conclude that the scrum master role is responsible for ensuring the scrum team is "productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value." I think that the CEO, CTO, Development Department Manager will particularly note the "highest possible value" aspect of the scrum master role and want to know if the scrum master is coaching the team toward this goal. Here are a few points to track the success of the scrum master:

• Is the scrum team (development, product owner, and scrum master) following the 12 principles of agile as defined in the agile manifesto?
• Is the scrum master ensuring the scrum team (development, product owner, and scrum master) is following the rules of scrum as defined in the scrum guide?
• Is the scrum master helping those outside the scrum team understand agile and scrum?
• Is the scrum master protecting the development team from interruptions?
• Is the scrum master removing obstacles and problems affecting the scrum team e.g. getting better computers, coffee, baby sitters, listening to problems ...?
• Is the development team moving toward being self-organizing?
• Is the development team moving toward being cross-functional?
• Is the development team enjoying work or do they dread coming to work?

I think most measures for scrum master are subjective but that really means you must exercise greater caution when applying your scientific methods. For example, if the product owner randomly asked ten customers if they liked the user interface to a product and one voiced the opinion that it's bad, then you probably wouldn't change the interface. If however, nine of the ten voiced the opinion that the user interface is bad then this means something even though it's still all very subjective. What the product owner is doing is taking purely subjective measures and objectively applying them to the science of statistics. Could all nine customers be an anomaly with your other 991 customers happy with the user interface? Of course the answer is yes but it's also very unlikely.

 

Measuring the scrum master's performance against the expectations found in the Scrum Guide can follow the same principles as above. For example, measuring the scrum master’s service to the development team in "coaching the Development Team in self-organization", one could use several subjective measures together, with any weighting you choose, and reasonably determine over time if the development team is becoming more, less, or remaining static in self-organizing, assuming the method of measuring and weighting remains constant. These measures might include:

• How does the scrum team rate itself in forming-storming-norming-performing?
• Does the development team pull items from the product backlog rather than having them pushed onto them?
• At the daily scrum, is the development team providing status to the chickens or are they planning the day's work?
• At the daily scrum, does one development team member repeatedly advise others of what work they should be doing?
• At the retrospectives, does the scrum team actively pursue areas for improvement and then execute on these improvements?
• Does the development team often seek outside assist on how to implement a user story?

Enough subjective measures can be found to objectively determine if the development team is self-organizing.

 

What Is Success?

You may often times hear that working software is the measure of a scrum team's success and this is then used to determine the general success of every person in the scrum team, including the scrum master. I would argue that this is not enough since working software doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable. Think about delivering working software after the company had already lost a competitive advantage or delivering working software that no one wanted or bought. It's also conceivable that some customers, early adopters spring to mind, would tolerate software that doesn't completely work in order to see the concepts and the potential of the product. The Scrum Guide specifically allocates responsibilities to the product owner and scrum master with regards to adding value; not so for the development team. I think that "value" in the context of the Scrum Guide is value for the customer and, consequently, for the business. The rules and practices in the Scrum Guide are there to support the 12 agile principles including the very first, "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software." It's the scrum master's role to ensure that the scrum team "satisf[ies] the customer" through the “continuous delivery of valuable software". The scrum master does this by making sure the scrum team "adheres to Scrum theory, practices, and rules". It's the responsibilities of the scrum master, as defined in the Scrum Guide, that business can use to measure the success and effectiveness of the person given the role of scrum master.

 

 

 

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Documenting Your Best Practices

I think it's important for the software organization to have documented Best Practices to provide a common starting point for all engineers, whether new or well-seasoned. The term Best Practice simply means this is the most efficient or simplest or greatest customer/business value, (I would stress the latter) way of doing something known to date. What Best Practice doesn't mean is that it's a rule. Rules change infrequently but Best Practices are always open to change.

The business may have a rule that an agile team must have a daily stand-up meeting visible and accessible to anyone who wishes to attend given the space available. How an agile team implements the daily stand-up meeting is subject to one or more Best Practice. There may be a Best Practice that has the Scrum Master facilitating this meeting, asking three questions: what have you done, what will you do and what problems are you having. There can be another Best Practice that has a different development team member facilitating the daily stand-up each day in a round robin fashion. Both these Best Practices can exist at the same time, in the same document, until one is proven better or, if they are equally beneficial, one is proven more popular.

I think that Best Practices are potentially updated after each agile teams' retrospective. One major pitfall of documenting Best Practices is these are never reviewed and updated. The business must guard against Best Practices becoming static and agile teams or the development manager need to ensure there's an ongoing effort to review and validate all Best Practices. If the Best Practices document hasn't changed in 30 days then maybe the agile teams are not trying to improve since most Best Practices are used in each sprint and subjected to retrospective review at the end of each sprint. If for example, all agile teams adopted the practice of having the Scrum Master facilitate the daily stand-up, having tried and rejected having a development team member facilitate, I would probably remove the Best Practice of having a different development team member facilitating the daily stand-up.

One last point, I don’t think there’s generally a great amount of detail in Best Practices as these are not always step-by-step procedures, at least not in an agile environment. If there’s a Best Practice to use planning poker in a sprint planning meeting (or grooming session) then there’s probably a brief description of what planning poker is and maybe a link to Wikipedia. Planning poker is a good example since there are at least a dozen different implementations that are almost but not quite the same. However, a code review Best Practice may be very detailed because there’s proven value in your company by following these detailed steps.

 

Best Practices document the way you do things now so you have something to use to measure improvement against. Best Practices become the organizations best training aid for new-hires and is the guide for all. Best Practices change all the time as agile teams experiment and replace outdated practices with new and better practices. Taiichi Ohno of Toyota Lean Manufacturing fame is quoted as saying, "There is something called standard work, but standards should be changed constantly. Instead, if you think of the standard as the best you can do, it's all over. The standard work is only a baseline for doing further kaizen. It is kai-aku [change for the worse] if things get worse than now, and it is kaizen [change for the better] if things get better than now. Standards are set arbitrarily by humans, so how can they not change?" All you need do is replace "standard" with "Best Practice".

 

 

 

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Retrospectives With Scientific Validation

During retrospectives, agile teams would benefit from following the Lean Startup concept of testing their improvement hypotheses using scientific methods. My experience during agile retrospectives was that for any 'improvements' agreed upon by the team, there was no deliberate validation that the change actually makes the hoped for improvement. The trick is to select quantifiable measures that can be directly linked to the 'improvement' i.e., cause and effect are firmly linked. In essence the Scrum team will conduct an experiment to determine if for some action/activity/change the team will get a measurable improvement.

 

It's important that the team only do one improvement at a time so that any effects can be attributed to the improvement. For example, if you're introducing pair-programing to reduce acceptance tests failures but you've also introduced a new test harness to help increase test coverage, you might find it difficult or impossible to determine which of these two affected acceptance test results and by how much.

 

The retrospective process steps would be: 

1.       Clearly state the exact problem the improvement will solve

2.       Clearly state what the results will be with the improvement in place

3.       Develop the falsifiable* hypothesis for the improvement (this is the experiment summary)

 

4.       Identify the metrics and measures to collect

5.       Identify how the metric data are collected

6.       Identify how the collected data is presented

7.       Identify how the team will know the hypothesis is proven true beyond a reasonable doubt

8.       Identify how the team will know the hypothesis is proven false beyond a reasonable doubt

The information gathered above is the output of the retrospective. The team should place the falsifiable hypothesis for improvement [retrospective experiment] in a prominent location so that everyone in the organization can see what the experiment is, the problem the team hopes to solve and the hoped for results of the improvement.

*A falsifiable hypothesis is a statement that can be proven wrong through observation or experiment. The structure of a falsifiable hypothesis is, "The team will [make this improvement] by [doing/not doing this action or activity]."

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Development's First Sprint: Things To Improve

There are many concepts of Agile and Scrum that new Development Teams may have trouble with in their first couple of sprints; daily builds not working, acceptance tests not automated, regression tests not automated, and on and on. These problems will pop up and the team will need to deal with them as well as anything else that comes between the team and a quality product they can be proud of. I've listed below some problems that by themselves aren't that big but I think have a long term impact on how well a Development Team becomes self-organized and cross-functional. I believe these are transitional problems that once solved, can help turn a group of individuals into a strong Scrum Development Team. 

Development Team isn't collaborating on designs and task identification.

The last thing a Scrum Master wants to hear at a retrospective is that team members couldn't help one another during the sprint because, "I didn't know anything about ___ ". This, or something like it, will happen in the Development Team's early sprints. The biggest reason for this is not everyone in the Development Team understands the high-level design or knows exactly what the tasks are about. This is usually the result of the walls people have built around technology areas or themselves. This behavior is often seen in a waterfall environment where the individual hero is praised and usually given the greatest rewards. However, the reason you and the company are most likely moving to Agile is to increase productivity, have more frequent releases, have happier customers, and increase profitability. The concept of  individual heroes now becomes a drag on these plans; no one can pick up the work of a hero if that person is sick, on vacation, or wins the lottery and leaves. Heroes also tend not to ask for help if they find themselves in some kind of trouble; that wall they built not only isolates the technology but it also hides mistakes and indecision.  Agile and Scrum welcomes these heroes into a Development Team but asks that they do two things: teach their specialty area to other team members and to learn the specialty areas of other team members. Having a Development Team that can do most any job, even if it takes 3 times longer to do it, will have profound benefits for the Scrum Team, the customers, and the company. A Development Team where everyone can collaborate on the design will result in the best designs. A Development Team that collaborates to find the simplest tasks to accomplish work will maximize the amount of work not done.

The Development Team's collaboration begins with the second part of the sprint planning meeting. This part of the meeting is for the Development Team to start "designing the system and the work needed to convert the Product Backlog into a working product increment." This is meant to be a collaborative effort by the Development Team to identify the work necessary for the first couple of days of the sprint. The Scrum Master should not only ensure this collaboration happens during the sprint planning meeting but should also ensure that the team does this throughout the sprint to identify the designs and tasks needed to complete each story.

Development Team feels estimating is a life and death struggle.

I was once at a sprint planning meeting where one person could not live with an estimation of 8 hours and insisted the 'correct' estimate was 12 hours. This person could not compromise on 9, 10, or even 11 hours: the correct estimate was 12 hours. I'm sure that in every company, every person estimating has experienced this in one form or another. There are going to be people in the Development Team who are afraid of being wrong or insist they're right. There may even be rumours that someone was let go because of poor estimations. Where I worked, this was a commonly stated 'fact' but even the smallest amount of research showed that this never happened; no developer was ever fired simply because they made an estimate that proved wrong. The Scrum Master can limit this by having the Development Team use story points and Planning Poker. Story point are just abstract enough to help the team reach consensus without getting too bogged down in precision. Another technique that can help is the Fist-of-Five for reaching a consensus. Use a 2 or 3 minute egg timer to hold debates over different estimations to a reasonable time limit will also hasten consensus.

The Scrum Master can show that there are no adverse repercussions with estimations by noting the estimates of tasks and stories and comparing the estimates with the actuals (don't attribute names to these). During the sprint retrospective ask the team to explain why some estimates differed from the actuals and let them suggest improvements to estimation techniques. The team will come to recognize that they provided the best estimates they could based on the knowledge they had at the time. However, the Scrum Master must be prepared to answer the inevitable suggestion that the Development Team do prototyping and design before doing story estimates and task breakdowns. The answer to this lies with the estimates Vs actuals. I had found Development Teams estimates are generally around 10% - 20%; a very good showing (the Nokia test has the goal of +/- 10%). It's likely that the Development Team does pretty well on their estimates but may have the occasional anomaly where they're off. Every time team estimates are off by > 50%, they should analyse the possible reasons during the retrospective. All of this analysis is done within the Development Team and isn't something that is made public although lessons learned are often shared with the organization. Outside the Scrum Team there really isn't any indication of estimation accuracy except maybe the team's velocity. However, velocity is an average over several sprints and won't be meaningful for new Development Teams until the 4th, 5th, or even 6th sprint. By this time, the Development Team should be less anxious over their individual estimates.

Tasks should be pooled and not assigned to individuals.

Development Team members may assign or take sprint tasks during planning and not concern themselves with other tasks not assign to them. Prior to adopting Agile, this is the generally accepted behavior but it will get in the way of a Scrum Development Team's being self-organized and cross-functional. The Development Team must exercise collective ownership of all work necessary to complete a story, after all, the team is held accountable to doing the work, not one individual. One thing the Scrum Master can do to help re-enforce accountability and provide cross-functional training is to have the Development Team members take the task from the person on their right and do that task instead of the one they announced during the meeting. This won't be popular with the Scrum Team and it probably won't be too popular with managers attending the daily scrum so don't do this too often; once or twice in each of the early sprints. This will drive home the lesson that there will be times when team members are sick, on vacation, or leave the company and the other members of the team need to step up and do work in areas they're uncomfortable with. In my experience, the discomfort is fear of the unknown rather than being technically incapable of doing the work.

The Scrum Master can also suggest that the Scrum Team do 1 week sprints. This forces the team to concentrate on just a few user stories, generally working on 1 story until it's completed before going on to the next. The Development Team members will often say that there isn't enough work on 1 story to keep everyone busy. My suggestion is for the team to sit down together and lay out all the tasks of a story showing what bits can be done in parallel and which ones have dependencies. This will generally result in a tasks for a story that are smaller and more detailed than the team would have previously done. Following a 'test first' philosophy, for both acceptance tests and unit/integration tests, will allow more people to work a single story and can even get the story completed faster.

Development Team is found skipping peer reviews and testing of software prior to delivery to repository.

This is one of those issues that occurs most often when the team feels pressure (real or perceived) to deliver something, anything by a specified time or date. If the Product Owner or management is exerting undo pressure on the Development Team, creating anxiety, the Scrum Master needs to re-educate them on the rules of Scrum, specifically, "Development Teams are structured and empowered by the organization to organize and manage their own work." It may be very hard or impossible for the Scrum Master to protect the team against excessive management pressure but the Scrum Master must try and convince management that the Development Team deserves the chance to be successful. Finally, if the Scrum Master is exerting pressure then you probably need to find a new Scrum Master, one better informed on Scrum.

I've also seen this problem because the developers are skipping reviews and tests on their own initiative. During a retrospective after a particularly embarrassing delivery to the customer, the Development Team asked that the Scrum Master double check the team's quality controls by asking for each completed task identified in the daily scrum: 1) was the new/modified code peer reviewed, 2) has all new/modified code been unit tested, 3) has the new/modified functionality been system tested, 4) have acceptance tests been run or partially run, and 5) has the product been regression tested in the affected areas. The scope and depth of testing is left to the Development Team's collective common sense. This actually worked well and after a couple of sprints the questions were no longer asked. What was interesting was how the developers reacted to these questions in the daily scrum. At first, some team members were sheepish and I got the impression that sometimes the answers weren't completely true but no one else on the team said anything. After a few more daily scrums with these questions, the other team members would occasionally question a team member's answer. Eventually the team members would question what was done before the Scrum Master could ask a question.

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