Agile Thoughts

Scrum In A Box

• So… they say that Scrum is not an “off the shelf” methodology.
• Well, wouldn’t it be nice if it was?
• Time to create Scrum In A Box – the ultimate off-the-shelf methodology for the smart, bargain-hunting Software Process Shopper.
• With this amazing new product all need for CSM training will be eliminated. 
• Get the Box, and DO SCRUM!

This was the vision given to the four development teams on the Buenos Aires CSM course.  Their task was to build this product in two days, over four 30-minute sprints.  A Product Owner was chosen for each team.  The teams decided for themselves who this would be, and eventually all the teams rotated this role.  The rest of the team were developers.  There was no assigned ScrumMaster role, but everything that would be learned through this simulation would educate the participants on the knowledge and qualities needed to take on that role.  Task boards had been created on the walls of the room and the teams were introduced to this essential Scrum tool prior to starting. 

We began the simulation by considering the requirements.  The teams had a badly written, and very vague product backlog to help them kick off.  The first part of the simulation involved a discussion on usability.  Who was this product for?  Who would use it?  Why?  Through this conversation the teams began to understand that perhaps there was a serious use for such a product.  It could be a Scrum education tool.  Working with their product owner the teams began writing user stories.  This proved to be very difficult.  The vision was now unclear, the technology (modeling clay, cardboard, craft knives, marker pens, collage…) was unfamiliar to most - and it was day one of the CSM course, for heaven’s sake!  These people had yet to learn about Scrum.  All in all it felt very scary and chaotic. 

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, discussion and analysis began paralyzing the teams.  The fog was thick and everyone was trying to talk their way out of it.  Not very efficient.  It was time for action.  Near the end of the first day the teams executed Sprint One.  Planning was tough; no clear requirements had been written, the teams had found estimation close to impossible and no one had any sense of business value.  I encouraged the product owners to simply pick two things that they thought the teams could start on, have the teams figure out some tasks and just get going.  Each team had a task board to work from; the planning sessions and the daily meeting would be centered on this board.

The teams all felt a sense of failure after Sprint One.  The product owners essentially rejected everything they saw.  But this is when the learning began.  Through seeing what he didn’t want, each product owner began to get a better idea of what he did want.  Working closely with the developers a vision emerged through the review, and was more finely tuned through the retrospective and the following planning meeting.

The second sprint slowed down a little, as more focus was put on the bigger picture, on the design/architecture of the product.  Less was delivered, but there was a sense that the teams were on the right pathway.  In the third sprint some very high quality work was beginning to happen and by the end of the forth sprint some amazing products were fully completed.  It was astounding.

This was the first time I had run a CSM class in this way, and the quality of the work far exceeded my expectations.  But it was not only quality in terms of the product itself; the participants really began to embody the sprit of Scrum in their work.  Teams became cohesive wholes, “pair-programming” practices were adopted, acceptance criteria was defined before development started, a common understanding of “done” emerged.  All the good Agile development practices (some of which I had not even introduced) began happening.  The room was buzzing.

In one excellent moment at the end of sprint three, a team who had designed their product as a board game spent the entire 15 minute review meeting playing the game with their product owner.  They described it as their “acceptance test”.  Beautiful!

As each sprint went by, I took less and less of a process-driving role.  (basically, I got tired of clock-watching and shouting).  The fourth sprint was total self-management and was the most effective of all, with everyone keeping to the time boxes and completing all their work on schedule - in fact some groups completed a few minutes ahead of schedule and were able to simply relax.  I spent most of the fourth sprint walking around the room, absorbing the energy and passion, with a big grin on my face.

Scrum In A Box gave the participants of this course the opportunity to learn Scrum at many levels.  They were in a class on Scrum, they were actually doing Scrum, and they were building a representation of Scrum which forced them to continually assess Scrum.  There was a sense of introspection and infinite recursion here.  A life-force beyond anything that was planned.  One team even built this idea into their product: the final element of their “Scrum tour” was a set of instructions of how to build “Scrum In  A Box” to educate others.

I was honored to be able to facilitate this CSM class.  I learned so much myself from the experience, and was fueled by the passion and engagement.  I’d like to thank all the participants for making this such a great experience, and for embracing Scrum so openly and joyfully.  I consider this a true shared learning experience.

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Later that evening I gave a two hour talk on Scrum at the public university.   I had imagined this as more of a lecture-style talk, but my co-organizer Alan Cyment had other ideas.  He encouraged me - and the audience - to get more interactive and we had a bunch of them up on the podium, holding hands in a twisted spaghetti-like formation, performing an exercise that in five minutes illustrates self-organization in a way that a million words could not begin to explain.  Following that interlude the energy of the room changed from quiet suspicion to interested engagement.  Thanks, Alan.  At the end of the talk we had a number of requests for further CSM training in Argentina. El virus está aquí!  Or, in Babelfish-speak: the agile insect has landed!

I now have a couple of days to relax in Buenos Aires, before returning on Saturday.