Scrum meetings! huh.. I’m not interested...

Have we ever felt that scrum meetings are waste? If the answer is yes, then we need to identify the reasons for that.

Why should we attend scrum meetings? Such concerns are often raised within scrum teams.

There are several reasons that scrum team member feel that such meetings are waste of time.

Let us take example of estimations.

A common problem with a new scrum team can be seen during estimations. It is generally observed with teams transform from waterfall to agile. In such teams, veterans dominate the estimation process and their estimates are finalized. Sometimes the situation gets worse where only veterans/specialists estimate and make a commitment. Junior team members are not involved during estimation. One of the reasons is at times most of the team mates of new agile team had worked together in some projects which followed waterfall methodology and accepted that the ways estimations were done and committed, the specialists know better.

While sometime it is taken as granted in new and immature agile teams, which do not have understood the significance of all the ceremonies of agile, some team mates feel that once the decisions have to be made by these specialists and they will be dominating the ceremonies, what is the use of attending such ceremonies?

Annoyed team mates feel that instead of attending these ceremonies they can put this time for some other purpose.

One other reason is being monotonous and not creating enthusiasm in these ceremonies. Ceremonies are for Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation and when due to any reason, no significant outcome or improvement is visible, it creates dullness.

This is true that apart of other responsibilities, facilitator needs to be energetic and innovative. Bringing new scrum games also play great role in such cases where team mates show unwillingness to join the ceremonies due to such dryness.

ScrumMasters/facilitators need to sense such alarming situations well in time and take the appropriate action before it gets late and spoil the team bonding. ScrumMaster also need to encourage all the team mates time to time, not to participate but participate together in scrum ceremonies.

Agility everywhere!

 

Our annual day function was nearing and our CEO announced to make it big.

The HR team and the cultural team were indicated to plan a big bash. Fortunately a few members of the cultural team are part of one of my development team. This team is comparatively new to agile and I got a chance to provide them this opportunity as a scrum game.
The pitch was ready.

·          They had a vision: Vision from our CEO - ‘Let us have a grand Annual function party!’

·          There were stakeholders: CEO, VP, AVP and the guests (of course).

·          There was a Product owner: HR executive

·         and a ScrumMaster:  Most active member of the cultural team who is in my team and a guitarist also.

·         There was a development team: Members from HR department and members from cultural team.

I asked my teammates to plan this function in an agile way.
It started with a product backlog. The scrum team (HR executive as Product owner, Most active member of cultural team as ScrumMaster and members from HR department + members from cultural team as development team) started to put Product backlog items in a spread sheet.  The product backlog started taking shape. It was one sprint with number of tasks.

Product backlog items:

·         Prepare list of guests, hosts

·         Finalize venue

·         Finalize  name & logo to our annual function

·         Decide theme of the party

·         Decide dress code

·         Prepare List of eatables and drinks

·         Send invitations

·         Appreciation for employees for contribution to the society

·         Appreciation for Best employee(s)

·         Prepare list of dance performances – Solo /group

·         Prepare list of Plays/skits

·         Prepare list Songs – Solo /group

·         Other Surprise Events

Sprint Planning:

Team started sprint planning. There was only one sprint planned. 4 weeks time was to go. The shippable product was the ‘Annual Function’. Team started Daily Scrum meetings for 5 minutes after lunch to know what each member has done since yesterday. What they will do today and if anyone faced any impediments. Definition of Done was created for each items of the sprint.
User stories were broken down to tasks such as while preparing guest list, include the food preference.

Sprint Execution:

·         All team mates started their tasks and peers were doing the review. Regular feedbacks were being provided during the peer reviews.

Sprint Review:

·         As a shippable product, the Annual function was celebrated.

·         All stakeholders enjoyed it.

Retrospective:

·         START Doing – More such events.

·         STOP Doing – None

·         CONTINUE Doing – Encourage more participation to make the event more joyous.

Observations:

·         As a self organized team, all team mates were taking up the responsibilities actively and willingly.

·         Regular feedback during cultural activities was very helpful to prepare for the final event.

Mission ahead:
After the success of Annual function, here came the next vision from the CEO – ‘Clean and Green City’.
Product backlog is growing for this vision. Really BIG Mission ahead…..

‘I wish’..My vision!

Friends, today we will have a quick tour of a sprint. This journey will give us an overview of sprint taking place.

This is a fact that any product development starts with a ‘vision’- a clear vision. In scrum the vision need not to be created as a large multi page document. Only a small vision statement is sufficient.

The vision is further converted into stories (epics) in this initial phase. It is not necessary that scrum team will write these epics as scrum team may/may not have been formed at this stage.

This high level road map is created in the form of initial product backlog.

Once the vision gets approved by the stakeholders and scrum team has been formed, a release planning is done to establish the next logical step toward achieving the product goal. A definition of done (DoD) is also established. Product backlog grooming is one of the processes taken up during release planning. Release planning is done generally considering either fixed date (only those features are considered which could be delivered on planned date) or fixed scope (features will be decided first and based on that date is finalized). Team’s velocity is also taken into account.

The very next step is to conduct a story writing workshop. Epics are broken into stories and the stories are estimated in story points. Though Product owner is the primary person to write these stories, however if needed the complete scrum team helps him to write user stories.

A release generally consists of many sprints. Before each sprint a sprint planning is done. This planning takes 4 to 8 hours. The Product owner produces the prioritized product backlog consisting of the estimated PBIs with the defined acceptance criteria. Scrum team selects the stories and this makes the sprint backlog. Sprint backlog contains the break-up of user stories in tasks which is estimated in hours.

Here starts the sprint execution. Daily scrum (also known as daily scrum meeting – timeboxed for 15 minutes) is a part of sprint execution and as name indicates, occurs on daily basis.

When the sprint is about to finish, two most important activities are done. Sprint review and sprint retrospective. Sprint review (Timeboxed 120 minute max for 2 week sprint) is done by the stakeholders to see the completed work and ascertain that the sprint is executed as per the definition of done. Sometimes sprint review is also called sprint demo. However sprint review is more than a demo. It’s an ‘inspect’ activity.

After sprint review the last important activity Sprint retrospective is done (Timeboxed 60- 90 minutes max for 2 week sprint). In this activity the scrum team review all the scrum related activities performed. Team also envisions whether any activity needs improvement? And if yes, how to achieve that? Three important points discussed are:

• What we want to continue doing?
• What we should stop doing?
• What improvement should be done?

Outcome of every sprint is a shippable product increment. The subsequent sprint starts very next day once the current sprint finishes.

Any point needs more insight, please let me know. See you soon!

Kanban or kanban? Chocolates are decisive!

       One of my friend and colleague returned back from USA after a month long official visit. While we were going through the road-map of upcoming projects he had with him and the planning to apply suitable agile practices in these future projects, he cracked a joke on my previous posts on scrum saying, ‘Hey… in all your posts you do promise for at least one topic to be explored in future. This reminds me of television soaps which are generally left incomplete at such a point for the next episode that it becomes necessary to wait till next one.’ He also pointed my out for mentioning kanban as Kanban at places and for my promise of posting something about kanban.

Though I have yet not finished the initial planned posts on scrum but as my friend got me chocolates from USA, I am bound to start some ground up for kanban.

Kanban or kanban?

You must be thinking what sort of question is this? But he was correct* as the practice is called kanban.

* Moreover a few chocolates are still in my pocket so how can I argue on this. Readers, who have not got the chocolates, may follow any of these- kanban or Kanban.

Kanban is made of two Japanese words kan and ban. Kan means visual, and ban means card. kanban approach is based on the principles of Lean. The concept of Kanban came from Toyota, where it was invented as a scheduling system for just-in-time manufacturing in the Toyota Production System.

The most common problems faced during development:

• Wrong estimates
• Inability of delivering tasks on the committed date.
• Unclear priorities.
• Improper distribution of tasks.
• Tasks bombarded from everywhere.

Kanban the savior: Kanban is a very young yet popular methodology based on three principles:

• Visualize
• Limit work in process
• Manage flow

Visualize: First principle of kanban is to make information visible. This can be achieved using electronic kanban board or simply by creating sticky notes representing each task with it’s most current status on a board. The visualization of work-flow on the board becomes apparent to everyone in the team. At times there are a few tasks exists which are often not visible clearly but consumes a lot of time of the team.  Such tasks can easily be captured on the visual board so all team mates including the management also get aware of these tasks and hence can be planned in a better way.

Limit work in process: The second principle of kanban is to limit the WIP. In this principle we  establish a limit for items we will work on at one time. The benefit of taking up a fewer items being worked is that each item will be done more swiftly. Team will focus on the work which is

Manage flow: To manage the flow up-to finish of the task is the third principal of kanban.

This principle indicates to manage flow in a quick and uninterrupted way and keep the work-flow continuously improving.

Kanban methodology started with three principles however recently, David J. Anderson and a few fellows have extended the three basic principles to five properties and six practices. These are known as ‘Core practices’.

As the last chocolate I had, has been finished hence I am taking a short break now. We will continue with kanban in next few posts but before that I have to provide a quick and complete flow of Scrum which is still in pipeline. Most probable this weekend we will see that flow.

Any question on kanban? Please do not hesitate to ask. I will be replying as soon as possible.

Debts are not bad every time!

Hi Friends, technical debt during sprints is a less discussed but very important topic. Let us discuss this today.

What is a technical debt?

Technical debt refers to the incomplete work in the software systems. It also refers to the shortcuts we knowingly take.

Ward Cunningham (Cunningham 1992) was the first to explain about the concept of technical debt).

Generally there are three types of debts- naive debt, unavoidable debt, and deliberate debt.

Example of Naive debt:

• Incompetent design: This refers to a design that no longer makes sense due to various changes in business.
• Known defects: The known problems in the software that we haven’t yet removed considering these will not impact in immediate future.
• Insufficient testing: This refers to the known areas where more testing could have been done.

Example of Unavoidable debt:

• A third-party component we used in our product and the interfaces to that component evolved over time. 

Example of Deliberate debt:

• Such type of debt is taken to achieve an important short-term goal for example launching a time-sensitive product into the market. 

I remember a few months back my team took a deliberate technical debt by launching a product with USD as the only currency supported. This was because of the business decision of launching the product ahead of the competitors and we were aware that the focus market was of USA. Later we repaid it by providing the multi currency support. 

Today’s technical debt becomes a future work hence it requires a balanced technical and business discussion. Technical debt should be kept low enough to avoid future problems in product development. Also technical debt must be paid off time to time.

A good strategy is to utilize the time we get during sprints when there is some time left in which no next story can be fitted.

When it is not necessary to repay the technical debt?

To repay the technical is not necessay every time. Here are a few situations when technical debt not needs to be repaid.

When the product is nearing to end of life and to repay the debt is not a wise decision.

A product developed for a short life span.

How to repay technical debt?

• During the development activity, whenever a development team member finds a technical debt in the form of any problem, the team member should clean up the problem. 

• Technical debts which are more important should be repaid first. 

• Technical debts should be repaid incrementally time to instead of large late payments.

Technical debt is very important to understand and needs attention & timely repayment. If it is not repaid in time then it may become burden later and impacts on team's velocity.

We will discuss more on technical debt in later posts.

Kenneth S. Rubin (Essential Scrum) has explained about technical debt in a fantastic way. For a detailed explanation readers should refer that topic.

See you soon with more posts…Have a great time ahead!

Estimates are everywhere!

Today we will discuss further on estimating the PBIs.
During product development there are three most important questions which are asked at very beginning.

• Time: When will be the development completed?
• Scope: How many features will be delivered?
• Cost: What will be the cost?

This definitely requires estimating the size of features we plan to develop and the velocity of the team.
How we estimate PBIs?

We estimate Product backlog items (PBIs)/stories using relative sizes, not absolute sizes. There are two most common units of estimation- Story points and Ideal days. In these, ‘Story point’ has got more popularity.

Story points:

Story points are measured considering complexity and physical size of the PBI. PBI may be ‘complex but small’ OR ‘simple but large’ OR ‘simple and small’ OR ‘complex and large’. Ultimately we need to know the efforts required to develop that PBI. This is achieved by comparing stories and putting points on these.

For example, if we compare two stories and find that the latter will take 4 times the efforts than the first, then we estimate the points for second story as points provided to first story multiplied by 4.

A good strategy is to start with the smallest story and providing it point(s). The question is how to provide story point(s) to this story? Let’s assume that the smallest story is about to create a UI for Registration form and the next story which is about integration of a shopping cart in the application, when compared the latter takes 4 times the efforts which first story will take. If the first story is marked with 2 story points the next story will have 8 points (2 * 4).
Ideal days:

Estimation in ideal days is a technique of estimating PBIs and it represents the number of effort-days or man-days needed to complete a story. Ideal time should not be treated as elapsed time/calendar days. Ideal days are total effort in days and can span for many days as per the hours utilization per day.

What is velocity?

The amount of work completed in a sprint is known as team’s velocity. After each sprint the size of completed PBIs is added and that constitutes the velocity of the team. Partially completed PBIs

are not included in the velocity as they do not have any value for the product increment.

To know the number of sprints for the release, size of the release is divided by the team’s average velocity. So for example if the release has 500 points and the average velocity of a team is 50, then it will require 10 sprints for that release.

Planning Poker

Planning Poker is a technique for sizing PBIs. Planning Poker was first described by James Grenning (Grenning 2002) and popularized by Mike Cohn (Cohn 2006).

The game begins…

The Product owner describes the PBIs and the ScrumMaster closely monitors, guides and motivates the team to participate in Poker planning.

Each development team member is provided with a set of Planning Poker cards for this game.

The product owner selects a PBI and reads the item to the team. Development team members discuss the item and ask questions to the product owner if any clarity needed on that PBI. Each member of development team selects a card representing his estimate without disclosing it to other team mates.

Once each estimator has made a private selection, all estimates are simultaneously shown to all estimators. If everyone selects the same card then it becomes the PBI estimate. If the estimates are not the same, the team members discuss and repeat the same until consensus is reached.

In no case average of the estimates is agreed as an estimate for any PBI.

This is how we estimate the tasks and velocity. If more clarity is needed on any point, please let me know. I will try to reply as soon as possible…

User stories continued...

In continuation of previous post…

Overview of User Stories:

Traditionally user stories are hand written on paper cards. Some times we use colored sticky to write story and place them over a wide board where each team member can easily view.  In addition to it there are many tools to help write and manage user stories. Rally and JIRA agile are a few I generally prefer.

It is not required to write all details as stories. Instead the development team and the customer discuss these details and make a few annotations on a story card based on the discussions.

Generally a story writing workshop is conducted to write the stories in the initial phase of starting the project, but this is not a strict rule. Stories can be written at any time throughout the project. Though the Product owner is responsible for writing the stories but the whole scrum team including domain experts do the brainstorming and facilitate Product owner during the story writing.

Each story is estimated in story points by the development team. Story points indicate the size and complexity of the story relative to other stories. These story points are very useful to determine the velocity of the team. We will discuss velocity in future. In short we can say that velocity is the number of story points the team think will be complete per sprint.

Acceptance Tests:

Acceptance testing is the process of verifying that stories were developed such that each works exactly the way the customer team expected it to work. The back of a story card holds reminders about how to test the story. These can be added of removed any time.

These tests capture the expectations of the stake holders that should be handled by the system.

User Roles:

It is very important to understand that there may be different users of the product/software. Every user has different perspectives and goals towards the product. This is the reason that before writing stories different user roles should be taken into consideration. For example in a B2B or B2C product there may be internal customers, external customers, admin group etc. Thus this will have significant impact on user stories. A very fantastic way to achieve the user role is to have persona. Think for it…and compare with avatars. I truly look forward to your views on it.

Techniques to write stories:

There are many techniques and a few are as below.

• Story-Writing workshops

• User interviews

• Questionnaires

• Observation

Estimating user stories:

User stories can be estimated in story points. Planning Poker is one of the techniques first described by James Grenning (Grenning 2002) and then popularized by Mike Cohn (Cohn 2006) is my favorite. We will see this technique in near future. For the fast and furious scrum followers check out your mobile devices (I used the android play store), you will find many fascinating tools free of cost for planning pokers.

User stories are further broken into tasks. Tasks help us to develop in a calculated way.

There is an acronym for creating effective tasks: SMART’.

S – Specific

M – Measurable

A – Achievable

R – Relevant

T – Time-boxed

Caution: Estimation is the part which is most concerning to each stakeholder. Let us discuss it further. I expect a few questions from all reviewers of this post. Till then ‘Have a great day ahead’.