Scrum-Summary

I know it’s been so long time I wrote some article in my blog. I will make sure to write one article per month starting from next year. Would like to share a scrum-summary which is written in PSM workshop (Dec 2015).

Have attended a PSM workshop conducted by Hiren Doshi, great discussions and good learning. At the end of the workshop, our trainer has asked us to write summary of what we have learnt in workshop and present it to all participants. 

Here is what I have written…

• Scrum is one of the agile frameworks developed by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland based on agile values and principles. It can be used for software development.
• Scrum is an iterative and empirical process. Scrum recommends 3 roles, 5 events and 3 artefacts.
• Scrum roles: Scrum master, Product owner and Development team
• Scrum Events: Sprint Planning, Daily scrum, Sprint review, Sprint retrospective, and the sprint
• Scrum Artifacts: Product backlog, sprint backlog, product increment
• Scrum Values: Focus, Courage, Commitment, openness, respect
• Empiricism: Transparency, inspection and adaptation
• Scrum helps in surfacing issues/impediments as early as possible.
• It helps people to collaborate on daily basis in daily scrum and create an environment of early feedback.
• Good collaboration between development team and business as PO is representing business side.
• Product feedback in Sprint review, People and process feedback from team in Sprint retrospection.
• Information radiators (Task Board) helps to create transparency with in the team and outside the team.

Hope this information helps for individuals who is looking for basics of scrum. Please add your points if i have missed any...Thank you.

-Balaji (sathrambalaji@gmail.com)

SCV Retrospection: The Supporter, the Critic, and the Visionary

I am happy to inform you that one of my article got published by Scrum alliance. Click HERE to read full article

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand. — Norman L. Kerth, The Prime Directive

At the end of a project, everyone knows so much more. Naturally we will discover decisions and actions we wish we could do over. This is wisdom to be celebrated, not judgment used to embarrass. — Norman L. Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review

Retrospection is an important Scrum event that provides the Scrum team with an opportunity to inspect its processes and collectively come up with improvements. It's the ScrumMaster's responsibility to create an environment of psychological safety in which all team members inspect the sprint activities and frankly discuss how they felt about them. At every sprint, the team discusses a couple of specific things they want to improve.

To increase the effectiveness of retrospectives, I have tried the following techniques with the team:

1. Traditional: What went well, what didn't go well, and what needs improvement
2. Starfish technique: Start doing, stop doing, keep doing, do less, and do more
3. Bollywood style: Hero: keep doing; Heroine: new experiments; Comedian: fun/joy; Villain: stops you from continuing) — Certified ScrumMaster® workshop by Satisha Venkataramaiah at Leanpitch Technologies
4. Sailboat retrospective: Anchors (impediments) and wind (positive factors)

All of these techniques helped gather insights into how the team felt about the sprint, but they didn't give input into how the team would improve. So I thought about how to get this from the team.

A couple of months back, I had attended a neurolinguistic programming workshop in which I participated in an activity called Walt Disney's Creative Strategy: The Dreamer, the Realist, and the Critic (Visionary).. It's a tool to spur creative thinking by using parallel thinking to generate ideas and then evaluate them.

I tried applying parallel thinking in the team retrospective: Every team member thinks in three dimensions, such as the Supporter, the Critic, and the Visionary (SCV), to provide his or her input. Let's consider these roles and see how they help in a team retrospective. – Read More