House Of The Rising Scrum

Yes, I’m having fun with my blog titles twisting classic song titles. Get used to it, I think I’ll keep doing it.

Fire Fighting After a couple of weeks at the new job, I noticed that there wasn’t really any direction to how issues were being addressed. It seemed like whatever the current fire was or whoever was pestering the loudest was getting their issue addressed first. This also meant that current issues being worked were being dropped for the latest “emergency” issue. Not exactly an ideal way to develop software (or build anything, for that matter). It felt like being a fire fighter, just answering the call for latest fire that needed putting out.

Almost immediately, I started pushing to change the team dynamics. I wanted my team to use a Scrum board to track their issues. Also, I wanted them to have quick stand-up meetings every day to let each other know where they were with each issue. A few on the team had tried this approach before (they had a previous project that used this method). Of those users, half of them hated it and the other half loved it. However, all agreed that the project implementation was a failure.

With a little persuading, I was able to get them to try the process again. Now, introducing a development team to the Agile process can be a very polarizing activity. People either love it or they hate it. Rarely are there any “meh” attitudes towards using Agile. With this team, I already had a split decision on members buying in to it. So, I decided to take it in baby steps.

Scrum Task Board The first step is introducing the team to a Scrum Task board. What is a Scrum Task board, you ask? In its simplest form, it is a grid of rows for short-term tasks using columns to show progress towards completion. But in reality, it’s a quick visual display for the team to see where they fall with their current issues. It helps to figure out what’s issues are done, what issue you’re currently working on and what issue is next. Below is a very simple example (image borrowed from here):

A generic scrum task board

Choosing a medium for your scrum task board is up to you and your team. First, you need to find a common area that everyone can easily see. You don’t want to create your task board in an far-flung area or a low-traffic area. It should be out in the open so that everyone, not just your team, can see what’s being worked on. Next, you need to decide what medium you’ll use for your tasks. The 2 most common that I’m aware of are Post-It notes and 3×5 index cards using thumb-tacks or magnets. While making this decision, you’ll need to decide what surface you’ll display your board on. This could be a window, wall, side of a filing cabinet, whiteboard … creativity is your only limitation.

My personal choice for Scrum task board is to use Post-Its on a portable whiteboard with 1/4″ tape to draw out the grid.

Daily Stand-up Meeting The second step is scheduling the team to have a 15 minute stand-up meeting every morning. The purpose of this meeting is to tell each other what you completed yesterday, what you’re working on today and what, if any, blockers you currently have. This allows the team members to stay abreast of each other’s issues and adds accountability to each team member. Below is an example of a stand up at the task board (image borrowed from here):

Sprints With an Agile development methodology, work is broken down into sprints. A Sprint is a predefined length of time to accomplish a set number of issues. Now, I didn’t want my team to get too bogged down in all the aspects of Agile just yet. I had loosely used the word “Sprint” a couple of times and noticed that I had a few puzzled stares. Without going into too much detail, I told them that the amount of time that we allotted to our scrum board was called a Sprint. And that that length of time was up to us, the team, to decide.

Early Adoption From my experience, a sprint is ideally 2-3 weeks long. However, I wanted my team to get the feel for the complete cycle of work quickly. I decided to have the team do a quick 5 day sprint. It was a Friday morning and we were deciding the issues that we would work on. So it made sense to have the following week, Monday through Friday, be our first official Sprint. Remember, some of the team had ill feeling towards the Scrum process. So I wanted to get some early positive points up for hopefully a long-standing Agile process.

Sprint 1: 5 Days Because of existing projects, this first sprint, there would be only three of us available to work on issues. Luckily, myself and the two other developers were already fans of Agile. So hopefully, we can show a positive, unified presence of a successful scrum for the other members to see. We accepted 13 issues into the sprint. At the end of it, we were able to deliver 8 issues to our production environment. The remaining 5 issues were descoped due to external blockers or scope creep. Since we don’t have a formal Product Owner monitoring a product backlog, we are relying on an issue tracking system which allows the reporter to alter the problem and scope at any time. We’ll need to work on that aspect in the next sprint and only accept issues that are more stable.

Sprint 2: 10 Days After the first successful sprint, we lengthened the sprint days to a full two weeks, or 10 days. Still it’s only three of us that are available to work, but so far, the two others are feeling more confident about their work and what’s expected. We have accepted 10 issues into the sprint this time. With a longer sprint, we felt we could deliver a couple of more lengthy, time-consuming issues. Hopefully, this sprint will also be a success.

Things To Come Once the team is comfortable with our board and stand-ups, I’ll introduce them to retrospective meetings, planning poker, and hopefully find some more team members to add to the sprint process.