Agile: Don’t Sell It, Demonstrate It

There are many things you can sell including some ideas but you can’t “sell” behavior and you should not try to sell Agile to people. Both of these are learned and become part of what you are; they become the standards of behavior by which you live. Because these are learned, try substituting “demonstrate” for “selling”. This is not to say you don’t persuade your C-Levels of the merits of Agile so you can experiment but selling alone isn’t going to be enough. If you approach your C-Levels about being Agile you might start at a disadvantage because, unless they're planning on becoming an Executive Scrum team, their main interest in Agile will most likely rest on results and outcomes, not theories. To put another way, if the business needs a hole, talking about the merits of using a shovel over a spoon won’t get the hole dug and won’t bring any value to the business. Instead, demonstrate a great and mighty hole can be dug quicker and more efficiently with a shovel, then do it again just to show it’s repeatable.

The Experiment

When I first started using Agile, the CEO & company were faced with a particularly challenging business opportunity requiring an innovative software solution in 3-months. The CEO asked if development could meet a hard commitment in 3-months but the answer was no. We followed a Waterfall paradigm at the time but we knew we couldn’t execute successfully in the short time available using our current methods and practices. Being in the right place (the business needed an alternative) and at the right time (we had just completed research into the various Agile methodologies), and of the proper Agile frame of mind (we were eager to experiment with Agile), I was able to implement a variant of Agile Scrum that allowed us to pivot 180 degrees and build a software solution within that 3-month window. Agile and Scrum made it possible for Development and Product Management to capitalize on our business opportunity quickly and efficiently. Did the CEO want us to do Agile? The simple answer was he really didn’t care what means or tools we used to be successful; what he wanted was for us to be successful. Adopting a flavor of Agile gave him and the business the result and success they wanted. And once he had seen a positive result, he asked why all the development teams weren’t using “that Agile thing”.

The Demonstration

The CEO was never “sold” the idea that Agile was anything special but instead we demonstrated that Agile could bring special results. The CEO, the board, and the shareholders want the company to be successful and profitable. If the way to achieve success is both repeatable and sustainable, all the better. If they had that success using Waterfall or Agile or any of the dozen or so other software methodologies, everyone would be happy. The R&D Manager and Head of Product Management suggested to the CEO that the only real possibility of success lies with using an Agile Scrum framework and practices. This was essentially the only executive coaching needed. The high visibility resulting from using Agile Scrum and Agile’s built in ability for the team to absorb changing requirements, gave the company a fighting chance to take advantage of the opportunity which, in the end, was met, exceeding most expectations.

To move the business at its highest levels often requires a demonstrable success. A business may still choose not to change after a demonstration (or two) but what are your chances for change if all you have are theories and anecdotal data from other companies?

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Product Backlog Flows

There are plenty of discussions in the agile community about how agile teams work and develop over time. Often neglected or poorly understood is how that work makes its way from the customer to the team. Below is a blueprint for creating an effective and efficient flow of work. I’ve included details but also left it flexible enough to be customized for your company’s specific circumstances.

- See more at: http://pragmaticmarketing.com/resources/product-backlog-flows#sthash.7ZvUkYFt.dpuf

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Self-Organizing Development Team

Definitions

·        Self-organizing teams are composed of individuals who manage their own work, pick up work based on need, and participate in team decision making.

·        Self-organizing teams must have a common focus, mutual trust, and respect.

By being self-organizing and self-managing, the team brings decision making to the level of the problem. This increases the speed and accuracy of problem solving.

Self-organizing and the Scrum Framework

The Scrum Guide gives the Scrum Master the role of coaching the Development Team in self-organization but doesn't provide insight or guide as how this is accomplished. So …

Tips For Management, Agile Coach, and Scrum Master to organize a team toward self-organization

·       Management (yes, management) must establish any parameters that the scrum team is required to work within. For example, usually only managers can hire and fire people. Otherwise, management should ensure they don’t get in the team’s way. Managers need to support the scrum teams rather than be a distraction.

·       Give a scrum team room enough to fail in order to allow them to succeed. Managers must not ‘step in’ every time they perceive the team is on the wrong track. The team may very well be on the wrong track but there are several inspect & adapt opportunities for the scrum team to correct itself. This is the big reason sprints are short, no more than 30 days, and most often 1 or 2-weeks long. I've seen a development team start a sprint, go down the wrong architectural path, discover it, do a re-design, re-do work they had already done, and still meet the sprint goal. True story. However, the chief architect had chewed his nails down to the knuckle while not saying anything. How proud was the development team after this? Extremely – they were trusted to get the job done and done right.

·       From the start, guide the team to do scrum (scrum guide). Shape the mindset and expectations from the start as this will be harder to influence and change later. Doing scrum by-the-book will not make you good at doing scrum but it will be easier for the team to later learn and adopt the nuances and spirit of scrum. 

·       Help the team become confident in their use of scrum early on. Use examples of how each inspect & adapt meeting can help improve the team’s work and their environment.

·       Remove any misconceptions the team has of scrum. Most teams will perceive that scrum is easy to do but it is actually hard to do scrum right day after day. Anticipate the development team’s reaction to this truth.

·       Use positive reinforcement and build a sense of achievement in the team by helping guide the team to successfully completing their sprints. Do not allow a team to over-commit in their sprint planning meeting based on hope alone. Guide the team to select a sprint goal that is achievable and don’t let ‘hope we’ll get it done’ be the team’s strategy. Hope is not a strategy.

·       Encourage ongoing adherence to scrum and agile practices. Watch for danger signs the team is reverting to older, non-agile ways of thinking and doing. For example, do they want to skip the daily scrum or sprint retrospective. Do they think only one person can do work in a specific area. Are they not forthcoming at meetings.

·       Get the customers and users involved in the process. Customers and users need to be engaged during requirement gathering but most importantly, must be engaged with the scrum team during the sprint review. If the customers or users are consistent no-shows at the sprint review or not showing interest at the sprint results, the development team will more likely lose their sense of purpose and possibly blame agile for their lowered self-worth.

·       Inspect & Adapt over blame. When someone on the team messes up, don’t say “Jane screwed up” or anything like this. I would try and restate it along the lines, “how was it the team allowed this thing to happen and what can the team do to prevent this from happening again?” Encourage the team to re-examine their team processes to see if something needs to change to avoid repetition.  Every effort should be made to make the team, as an entity, the focal point during inspect & adapt meetings and discussions rather than specific individuals. This will help reinforce that the everyone on the team is equally responsible and accountable for the results and outcomes of the team. This is along the “all for one and one for all” philosophy. While it’s important to know someone forgot to get their code, document, etc. reviewed, it’s more important to understand how the team allowed this to happen and to see if there’s something the team can do in the future to prevent it from happening again.

·       Identify team members who hamper or slow down the team’s productivity because of their personal characteristics and practices. Individual personality of team members can be considered more important than skill sets when selecting people for a development team. Work with the team and management to remove people who have difficulties adjusting to agile. This is a hard decision but one that needs to happen quickly; these are not ‘bad’ people but are people who can’t adjust to agile and scrum ways of thinking. Many believe the most productive scrum teams are open, honest, willing to change, and can see the team being greater than the sum of the individual team members. If a person doesn’t have or can’t quickly acquire these characteristics, then they may be an obstacle to self-organization and pose a threat to productivity necessitating their removal.

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The Scrum Master: Career Path or Career Oblivion

What is the career path for a Scrum Master?

That question was raised recently when I was asking people in the Development department if they thought they'd like to be a Scrum Master and whether they would apply for a Scrum Master role. Of course the question and answer related to their specific company but I've heard the same question asked at Agile meetups and Agile conferences. The short answer [to me] is: there's a clear career path for Scrum Masters. The key to this career path is growth.  Let me explain.

Those of you that work in Development are sometimes isolated from the business. This is not an insurmountable problem but let's be honest, work on products occurs in Development and the business of the company occurs in the sales/marketing offices of the various regions. You could think of Development having the intellectual property of the product, the brain, whereas the regional sales/marketing teams (Americas, Asia, Europe, Australia, Africa) form the heart. Neither can survive without the other and both are necessary for growth and vitality. The best scenario is that the brain (Development) and the heart (sales/marketing teams with their customer insights) work together in a seamless, symbiotic relationship. Establishing and maintaining a great communications link, having everyone working from the same page, and working toward a shared product vision are essential ingredients for growth. From a Scrum prospective, the Scrum Masters are the people whose role it is to find a way to make this happen.

In the Scrum Guide, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland imagine a world where the Scrum Masters, get the organization to understand and work with the Scrum Teams by:

• Leading and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption,
• Planning Scrum implementations within the organization,
• Helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact Scrum and empirical product development, and
• Causing change that increases the productivity of the Scrum Team.

A Scrum Master will hasten the adoption of Scrum Values (from the Scrum Alliance) 

• Focus - Because we focus on only a few things at a time, we work well together and produce excellent work. We deliver valuable items sooner. 
• Courage - Because we work as a team, we feel supported and have more resources at our disposal. This gives us the courage to undertake greater challenges. 
• Openness - As we work together, we express how we're doing, what's in our way, and our concerns so they can be addressed.
• Commitment - Because we have great control over our own destiny, we are more committed to success.
• Respect - As we work together, sharing successes and failures, we come to respect each other and to help each other become worthy of respect.

But how does this lead to a career path?

By improving lines of communications, by getting those in direct contact with customers communicating the pain customers feel, by getting the product development teams to have empathy with the customer, by understanding the impact of technical solutions on the customers, by keeping all aspects of the business informed of customer problems and potential solutions, by being transparent, by continually striving to improve, by creating a culture where learning trumps blame, by creating a culture where the question is not, "what have you done?" but instead, "how can I help you?", by doing all these and more, the Scrum Master will create the opportunity for the company to experience unprecedented growth. And when you have growth, you create more jobs and a larger product base and with that comes the need for more sales people, more marketers, more product managers, more products, more projects, and more Scrum Teams. I should say that Scrum Masters are almost never ever directly responsible for a company's growth. However, through the actions of the Scrum Master and many of the communication improvements and process streamlining, the inevitable result will most likely be growth.

Scrum Masters typically move into roles like product owner, product manager, head product owner, head of product management, program manager, project director, program director, agile coaching, development manager, technology manager, and others. Most of these roles may not exist today but with growth and expansion, some of these roles will come into being.

Whether your company or business has a global footprint or is a young Start-up, Agile and Scrum can be tools for growth and the Scrum Master role is positioned so that the results of good Scrum Mastery is company growth. Once there's growth, there almost always follows more and greater opportunities. Who is better positioned to move up and forward than the Scrum Master?

Your thoughts?

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Organizational Adoption of Agile

From Craig Larman - Larman's laws of organizational behaviour:

 

1.       Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level manager and "specialist" positions & power structures

2.       As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be reduced to overloading the new terminology to mean basically the same as status quo

3.       As a corollary to (1), any significant change initiative will be derided as "purist" and "needing customization for local concerns" -- which deflects from addressing weaknesses and manager/specialist status quo

4.       Culture follows structure.

i.e., if you want to really change culture, you have to start with changing structure, because culture does not really change otherwise. and that's why deep systems of thought such as organizational learning are not very sticky or impactful by themselves, and why systems such as scrum (that have a strong focus on structural change at the start) tend to more quickly impact culture. John Seddon also observed this: "Attempting to change an organization's culture is a folly, it always fails. Peoples' behaviour (the culture) is a product of the system; when you change the system peoples' behaviour changes."

 

I think that those who believe Agile and Scrum are the way forward will be at odds with most businesses that have a deep institutionalized Command & Control structures that rests responsibility, but usually not accountability, within groups/committees while diverting responsibility away from individuals. In Scrum we rest most responsibility on the Product Owner and hold this person accountable for the business value delivered at the end of each and every sprint. It is often this simplicity Scrum provides that is in direct conflict with the ‘status quo’. So how to begin changes to the existing structures?

 

First and foremost, you must have an Executive Sponsor. Without Executive Sponsorship your attempt to directly adopt Agile will almost certainly fail. This is more than just having managers that agree to allow you to use Agile; this is a person who has the rank and status in the business structure who can influence the often many groups/committees who collectively and traditionally have controlled projects.  Agile is a movement that requires top-down leadership to say ‘this is going to happen, here is why it is good and we should all start rowing in that direction.’ The Executive Sponsor, along with possibly one or more Agile Coach specifically trained and experienced in agile adoption at the executive level, will be handing out the oars.

 

What if you have no Executive Sponsor or the Executive Sponsor’s influence is severely limited? Under these circumstances, full Agile adoption is very unlikely to happen. However, there is a strategy that could overcome the tremendous obstacles that are in the way but it does depend on you finding some in Mid to Upper level Management more interested in results rather than institutionalized processes. The ultimate result is usually a hybrid adoption of Agile where all or some of the institutional controls remain in place but an Agile sanctuary is carved out with fewer of these institutional controls than a traditional waterfall project. This hybrid Agile project is not truly Agile but neither is it true waterfall. The strategy follows a bottom up Agile Adoption approach that will take time, maybe a lot of time, to slowly chip away at the traditional structure and replace it with an Agile structure and Agile mindset.

 

The strategy is twofold:

1.       Target getting support from managers in the organization that are more likely to support Agile; and

2.       Target going around the organizational structure of “over seers”

 

The strategy includes targeting those executives in middle to upper management that are more likely to support an Agile process and have some influence on those in the organization who are stanch supporters of the institutional controls. The idea here is not to change these people completely over to the Agile mindset but rather get these targeted managers enthusiastic enough about Agile so they can see the possibilities and potential of Agile. Targeting managers who don’t have influence over supporters of the processes or targeting managers who are the stanch supporters of the processes is usually a tactical mistake. Targeting a manager who doesn’t directly influence those in control of the processes might be an easy convert but other than a quick burst of satisfaction, the real battles will still lie ahead. The manager who is a supporter of institutionalized processes is very difficult to convert; they probably believe in their familiar processes and controls much like you believe in Scrum, albeit for different reasons. A word of caution, because you’ve gotten some support for your Agile project, you must remember that “success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.” For those in middle to upper management who supported you earlier, to ensure their continued support of Agile and endorse its use, hybrid Agile projects must succeed and succeed “loudly”. If your project fails or succeeds but with only a whimper, some, most, or all middle to upper manages may forget that they ever supported Agile.

 

The second part of your Agile adoption strategy will be to identify all those organizational groups and individuals who traditionally sign-off on projects and find a way to exempt the Scrum project from these. These groups are those who sit on gate committees, steering committees, technology committees, or any one of a dozen other committees that approve, sign-off or use other mechanisms of “over-seeing” a project. These groups are often a source of power and prestige for its members and are traditionally very difficult, if not impossible, to get around without an appropriately positioned Executive Sponsor. The best way to get around these groups is to make your project a separate business unit that answers to the CEO/board. This follows along how IBM built its PC division in order to get out from under the bureaucratic thumb of IBM’s corporate structure.  Another tactic is to chip away at the required process these groups require projects to follow. This can lead to some relief for the project but will probably not succeed at allowing full Agile adoption for quite some time.

 

Is doing a Hybrid Agile Scrum adoption good? The short answer is yes. By simply following the activities defined for Scrum, (Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective), Jeff Sutherland has said that this will increase productivity by 20%-30%. However, the greater benefits of Agile are really attained through following of and embracing the deeper meanings of the Agile Manifesto, the Scrum Guide, and Scrum Primer. To become “hyper-product” would require everyone involved in the project (managers and scrum teams) to believe in and live Agile and Scrum. Unless the Mid to Upper level Managers of the business are only interested in results and don’t really care how you achieve them, your best approach to adopting Agile is incrementally, one step at a time.

 

Craig Larman is co-author of:

• Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite & Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum
• Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum
• Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide

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Sprint Review Facilitation & Customization

The Scrum Sprint Review is a key Inspect & Adapt meeting where the Scrum Team discusses with Users, Customers, and Business stakeholders what was "Done" in the just completed Sprint. The Sprint Review meeting is short but must cover the agenda items listed below. The attendance by the Scrum Team is required. Attendance by stakeholders is optional but should be strongly encouraged for those key stakeholders most affected by the Sprint results. This article gives some advice on how to conduct the Sprint Review when stakeholders are unable to physically be present.

 

During the Sprint Review, the Scrum Team and stakeholders collaborate about what was done in the Sprint and the Product Backlog is amended if needed. Based on that and any changes to the Product Backlog during the Sprint, attendees collaborate on the next things that could be done. The Product Owner provides the stakeholders the likely completion date for the release based on the Development Team's velocity and work remaining in the Product Backlog. This is an informal meeting, and the presentation of the Sprint results is intended to elicit feedback and foster collaboration.

 

One hour Sprint Review Agenda includes the following elements:

• The Product Owner identifies what has been “Done” and what has not been “Done” (suggest 5 minutes)   
• The Development Team discusses what went well during the Sprint, what problems it ran into, and how those problems were solved  (suggest 10 minutes)
• The Development Team demonstrates the work that it has “Done” and answers questions about the Increment  (suggest 15 minutes)
• The Product Owner discusses the Product Backlog as it stands. He or she projects likely completion dates based on progress to date  (suggest 10 minutes)
• The entire group collaborates on what to do next, so that the Sprint Review provides valuable input to subsequent Sprint Planning Meetings  (suggest 20 minutes)

 

The feedback from the stakeholders, directed toward the Product Owner and Scrum team, is the most important thing to get out of the Sprint Review. The result of the Sprint Review is a revised Product Backlog that defines the probable Product Backlog items for the next Sprint. The Product Backlog may also be adjusted overall to meet new opportunities.

 

Customization for Stakeholders who cannot be physically present at the meeting

A Scrum Team strives to ensure the key stakeholders, as identified by the Product Owner, are in attendance at each Sprint Review. The key stakeholders identified may differ from Sprint to Sprint based upon the work selected in each Sprint, but it is important to the success of the project that those identified feel compelled to attend the Sprint Review when asked. When a stakeholder cannot be physically present at the Sprint Review meeting, the Scrum Team loses out on viewing subtle hints on the reception of their Sprint results and future Sprint plans. Stakeholder body language and tone are indispensable clues to the observant Scrum Team which can be lost when stakeholders are not with the team during the Sprint Review. Unfortunately the realities of the business means that stakeholders are distributed across several locations and cannot always be physically present at the Sprint Review. Below are the options in order of preference.

 

Telepresence:

 

Telepresence is the preferred method for stakeholder involvement in the Sprint Review when not able to physically attend. Scrum Master would schedule the telepresence rooms locally and at all remote locations if possible. The Sprint Review meeting should be conducted as if all people were in the same room.

 

Advantages:

• Stakeholder sees what those present in the meeting room see
• Stakeholder is not a disembodied voice but a real person
• Scrum Team and other meeting attendees can see and gage stakeholder's reactions to product demo and artifacts
• Scrum Team and other meeting attendees can see and gage stakeholder's reaction to comments, statements, and suggestions
• Facilitator of the Sprint Review can better steer the Sprint Review back to the Sprint Review agenda when necessary
Disadvantages:

• Difficult to overhear side conversations from remote stakeholders

Webex / LiveMeeting / Net Meeting / or other online collaboration tool:

 

Online collaboration tool is the preferred method for stakeholder involvement in the Sprint Review when not able to physically attend and access to a telepresence room isn't available.

 

Product Owner should specifically ask remote stakeholders for their input on the way forward for improving the product.

Advantages:

• Stakeholder most often see what those present in the meeting room see
• Stakeholders can follow and participate in discussions on the just completed work shown in the demonstration


Disadvantages:

• All stakeholders will need the same online collaboration tool installed and available
• Higher likelihood that remote stakeholders will talk over people in the meeting room
• Higher likelihood that people in the meeting room will talk over the remote stakeholders
• Easier to mis-read voice inflection and tone without seeing the body language
• Difficult to overhear side conversations

Speakerphone:

 

Using only a speakerphone (no video link or web sharing) is the last option available for stakeholders who don't have access to collaboration tools and no access to telepresence equipment.

 

To give the stakeholder a voice in the Sprint Review, the Scrum Master or Product Owner, as appropriate, would ask those who are remote to provide their input before the Sprint Review meeting so the Scrum Team and stakeholders at the meeting can review their input together. This way the remote teams know that their input counts and will heard by all people in the room.

 

Product Owner should specifically ask remote stakeholders for their input on the way forward for improving the product.

 

Advantages:

• Remote stakeholders have a proxy voice in the Sprint Review


Disadvantages:

• Speakerphone stakeholders will not see what's being presented
• Speakerphone stakeholders will find it difficult/impossible to follow discussions during the product demo and presentation of any related artifacts
• Speakerphone stakeholders may find it difficult to collaborate with those in the meeting room without seeing the Sprint results
• Higher likelihood that remote stakeholders will talk over people in the meeting room
• Higher likelihood that people in the meeting room will talk over the remote stakeholders
• Easier to mis-read voice inflection and tone without seeing the body language
• Difficult to overhear side conversations

 

 

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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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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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Before the First Scrum: Development Team

The members of the new Scrum Development Team are usually drawn from the company's existing software development organization and have probably been following a waterfall methodology until now. If your company's planning on using a Scrum Coach, then most of what follows may not be applicable as the coach with have their own methods and techniques. However, for those organizations that will have their Scrum Teams self-start from within, here are some points on how to select the Development Team and prepare them for their first sprint.

Selecting the Development Team

The Scrum Guide lists the Development Team's characteristics as: self-organizing, cross-functional, having no titles other than Development Team member, equally shared accountability for the sprint, and no sub-teams within the Development Team e.g. database, test, GUI, etc. Although it's possible that your first Development Team will have these characteristics, it's very unlikely. These characteristics are what the Development Team hopes to achieve and it's the Scrum Master that will help guide the team as quickly and with as few detours as possible over the first half dozen sprints or so.

So what is it you're looking for when forming a Scrum Development Team for the first time? There's really only one thing that needs to be considered: the Development Team will need to have the technical expertise to do the work that the project's requirements demand. The company I worked at did exactly this when forming their very first Scrum Development Team and it proved to be a success. A step by step approach to select and prepare a Development Team for Scrum might look like this:

1. Review the project's requirements to determine the necessary functionality and necessary technical competencies needed for implementation. The review is probably done by Product Managers, Project Managers, senior architects, and team leads. The irony is that with the exception of Product Manager, these roles will almost certainly disappear as the software organization moves toward Scrum. The Scrum Team as a unit will replace the team leads, architects and project managers as they become more self-organizing.

My first experience with Scrum started this way. The company was doing waterfall when a new business opportunity came along. Once management, particularly Product Management and R&D Manager understood the requirements, it didn't take long to see that waterfall methods wouldn't be able to meet the contract dates. They concluded that a different development methodology was needed that could quickly implement a few hundred requirements but be transparent enough so unnecessary and problematic requirements could be dropped long before developers wasted a lot of time on them. Agile and Scrum provide the transparency and seemed a logical fit in order to meet the contract.

2. Based on these needs, create a list of 5 - 7 software personnel that will satisfy most or all of the technical competencies needed. Everyone in a development organization should be considered for membership in a Scrum Development Team. The only exception might be someone known to be totally unable to work in a team environment. Even then I would suggest placing these people in a Scrum Team as you might be surprised who fits in and who doesn't. Management should allow everyone a chance to succeed in Agile. Try to avoid putting only the very best software people into a single Scrum Team. It isn't necessary since the total of knowledge in a Scrum Development Team is usually greater than the knowledge of any one individual. And besides, if your company decides it will have 2, 4, or more Scrum Teams, the more experienced people can be seeded to every team rather than all in one team.

My first Scrum Team consisted of the most experienced people (team leads) in the software organization and were selected based on the technical requirements of the project. The project had 4-2 week sprints and was a great success. After the two month project ended, the Scrum Team split up. Although they did the principle Scrum activities; sprint planning, sprint, daily scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective, they didn't really do Scrum all that well. In my view, having only the most experienced or senior engineers in one team, the ones who have been doing waterfall the longest, will slow progress toward self-organizing and being cross-functional. These senior people will have to change the most to adopt Agile and Scrum. For example, during a daily scrum meeting it became apparent that one team member wasn't doing any of the tasks on the scrum board in his specialist area. No other Development Team member questioned this. When I asked what task he was doing he said it would take longer to explain what he was doing than to do it. He didn't ask his fellow team members for assistance but neither did any other team members offer to assist. The Scrum Team's team lead called in an architect to help on the problem and after working the weekend, the problem was resolved. In the post project review it turned out that because most everyone on the team was a fairly senior engineer and team leader, they felt that the Scrum Team's team lead would sort it out as they would do if they were the team lead. In the pre-Agile environment, the team lead had the responsibility for solving technical problems for the team and was generally held accountable for the team's success. In Scrum, the accountability for the success of a sprint rests equally among all the team members. This is a significant power shift for former team leads.

On the other hand, getting the more senior software people on board with Scrum through a short-ish project can have long term benefits. Once this team breaks up, they can go to other new teams and be champions of Scrum within their new teams.

3. The Scrum Master introduces Agile and Scrum to the newly formed Development Team. The focus should be the Agile Manifesto and the 12 principles. The Scrum Master should describe the Scrum Roles, the expectations of the Development Team as they relate to Scrum, and emphasize the Development Team's empowerment to find and implement an appropriate solution. I would suggest this be a short introduction; no longer than 60 minutes. Review the Agile Manifesto and Scrum Guide and then tell the Development Team that they're empowered to run the sprint as best they see. Start sprint planning that day or the next.

A short meeting (< 60 minutes) just to present the facts of Agile and Scrum will help the Development Team 'hit the deck running.' If you have a long, drawn out session, the conversation will eventually lead to discussing waterfall  which will invite comparisons between "the way we used to do it" and Scrum. This will lead the team members making choices between the two i.e. which is better. The purpose of this meeting is to familiarize the Development Team on Agile and Scrum and not to debate whether the company should be changing to Agile (I assume those discussions and decisions had already taken place). I suggest going through the Agile Manifesto first and then the Scrum Guide. When doing the Scrum Guide, relate the points in the Scrum Guide back to the Manifesto to help re-enforce the principles of Agile. An agenda might look like this:

1. Agile Manifesto
2. Scrum Roles
3. Scrum Principle Activities
4. Scrum Rules
5. New Techniques And Concepts [user stories, planning poker, acceptance tests, continuous integration, daily builds, ...]

4. Co-locate the Development Team removing any partitions, bookcases, or other office furniture that prevents the newly formed team from being able to make eye contact and hear each other talk. Get some whiteboards or have a wall located with the team where they can track their sprints (Scrum Board), add notes, do designs, document user stories and acceptance criteria, and plan the release. All this will help facilitate communication within the team. The Scrum Master and Product Owner should sit next to the Development Team's area where they can hear snatches of conversation and be summoned quickly but they shouldn't sit with the Development Team. Co-locating the Development Team, will help empower them to self-organize, makes it easier for the team to learn from each other (cross-functional), and fosters direct, face-to-face communications.

A few people, usually the shy or paranoid, will absolutely loath moving but the majority will be able to see the benefits. After a few sprints, the shy people will be noticeably more open and communicative and the paranoid people will be less fearful of their work being scrutinized.  Be sure to have plenty of white board space for the team.

5. Establish a Definition of Done for the Scrum Team (see the short paper Definition of Done: How to Ensure Compliance). The Scrum Master might want to assess the Development Team's capabilities for their first couple of sprints and allow the team to adopt a Definition of Done that offers the team a chance to succeed and yet has room for growth.  As the Scrum Team re-assesses their Definition of Done at each sprint retrospective, any weaknesses in the Definition of Done can be addressed and the Definition of Done modified to strengthen and improve the team's sprint results.

I found that the Scrum Teams had a terrible time adhering to their Definition of Done, especially in their first few sprints. I think the reason for compromising the Definition of Done is due to the long tradition of shipping products even when they weren't ready. The line goes something like; the customer would rather have something that almost works than to have nothing.  In pre-Agile you deliver something that doesn't always work whereas in post-Agile you deliver something that works but may not have all the features. This is a subtle difference but I think it's the key to Agile. The customer is meant to see new and working features and capabilities at each sprint review.

6. The team needs to develop the capability to generate daily builds before starting the first sprint. This phase is often called sprint zero. To take full advantage of Agile, the team needs the ability to generate workable builds on a daily basis.  This is part of continuous integration. Continuous integration is the practice of performing a clean build, conducting full integration, and running all tests every time a change is committed to the code repository. This is accompanied by frequent integration of each developer’s work into the code repository.

Working builds were a luxury during my first sprint but steadily improved during the subsequent sprints. This was a most import lesson learnt in our first venture into Scrum. At a minimum, the team needs to successfully run automated unit/integration tests on a daily basis to help ensure the quality of new code and ensure there's no regression on legacy code. The team needs to have a build notification message, usually emailed, that lets people to know what the build status is and exactly which feature was being delivered or what in a feature was being fixed.  The team should be striving to have acceptance tests automated and run on a daily basis. The team needs to get to the point where it is unacceptable for a build to be broken.  If the build breaks or the product regresses, the offending code is removed from the build and the daily build is then released.  The team must fix the bad code before any new functionality is added to the code base.

The Development Team should also automate their legacy acceptance tests and other system tests and have these run on the daily build. Legacy tests will most likely not be automatic but the team can add user stories to the product backlog to create automatic tests.

The Scrum Guide places the responsibility for educating and training the Development Team, along with the Product Owner, on the Scrum Master. Getting the Development Team together and ready for their first sprint is the easy part; the Scrum Master must now teach the concepts and intent of Scrum and Agile to the Development Team until they can do Scrum in their sleep. Hopefully, the day will come when the Scrum Master recognises that the Development Team really doesn't need a Scrum Master anymore.

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