ScrumMaster's Corner

A state of mind of a Scrum Master is pretty simple. It consists of just 5 states: Observing as the default one, and based on the observation, one of the following can be activated: teaching, facilitation, coaching and removing impediments. It seems to be obvious that the last one is the easiest one. For example the team needs a license for any software so you go to get an approval and buy it. Simple. Before I get to the tricky part I want to emphasise that as an SM you should remove only those that the team cannot remove by itself. It is not unusual that the Scrum Master doesn't understand his own role and in an effort trying to be useful every day he becomes a mother of the team which kills the ability to self-organize.  How the Beast Got Unleashed When I took the challenge to build a scrum team as a dedicated scrum master I was truly convinced that the goal is to deliver a beautiful shiny high performing team with no scratches. That was my definition of success on this missi...

The concept of tribal culture in an organization was introduced in the book  Tribal Leadership . It is quite interesting theory and from the agile environment perspective it has a new and important dimension. Let's have a look and put things together.  A tribe is a group of people that have something in common. In an organization trying to set up agile environment, we can easily imagine a scrum team. But we also have the community - a team of teams. Then there are virtual teams like a team of scrum masters, product owners or managers. The whole business groups... We can identify tribes at basically every scale.  A tribal culture is the dominant culture that can be observed in a group of tribes. Or in an organization. The culture can be described as 5 stages. Let's explore these stages and then we will have a look at what it means for us. Stage #1 - Life Sucks A culture of individuals with no hope. Everybody is alone in such culture. This is a culture of prisons a...

Team development stages were described by Tuckman and his theory is already a classic. I want to have a look on how this theory applies to agile environment. Another theory describes team dysfunctions as a pyramid or layers and finally team toxins are a kind of behavior patterns that can be flying in the air as viruses - harmless to some extend but capable to poison the whole team or organization when the concentration exceeds certain limits. I want to compile these things into something short and understandable.  Stage #1 - Forming  Every team starts as a group of individuals. People are working according to their habits and maintain silos. They're focusing on their speciality and they don't care of others too much. ScrumMaster's main job at this stage is to teach scrum principles, help to see benefits and understand expectations. Stage #2 - Storming As people start working together the artificial harmony of the previous stage disappears. Tension grows and soon or...

Scrum defines three roles. ScrumMaster, Product Owner and Development team. While it is easy to understand the PO and dev team role, to understand the ScrumMaster role can be challenging even for ScrumMasters. ScrumMaters are building self-organized teams. But what ScrumMaster does when the team is already self-organized? Let's take a look at a concept of three levels of the ScrumMaster as it it described in the Great ScrumMater: #ScrumMaster Way book. Level #1 - My Team ScrumMaster at this level feels responsibility for his team. The goal is to build self-organized team and to let people embrace the agile mind set. It sounds easier than it is. As a beginner the ScrumMaster can be even struggling with questions like "How can I make myself useful everyday?". But the goal is a long-term activity and the SM should actually suppress the urge to do something, i.e. give advice, propose a solution etc... The first step for SM should be to make himself comfortable in observi...

A legend says that there was a government that spent millions of dollars on a weather prediction satellite. After a big effort and long time they developed a thing that was able to accurately predict the weather with 70% success rate. It was quite good until somebody realized that if they simply said that today's weather will be the same as yesterday's weather they'd also have the accuracy of 70%. The idea is that you can predict what's gonna happen from what already happened. In the scrum process, this principle helps us to avoid overcommitting. The rule says "Don't take more to the next sprint than you delivered in the previous sprint". It can perfectly happen that the team cannot deliver the whole sprint commitment. But it is very important to take appropriate steps in order to keep this problem under control. And applying the yesterday's weather rule is the basic thing that you can do. Just reduce the sprint commitment of the next sprint to the ...

There are three main things that you need to do in order to make scrum working. You have to create backlog, build a fully cross-functional team and deliver tested software. But this all is still not enough if you don't have a good user story. And from the other end, good user story will bring these values naturally. How do we know that the story is good? Good user stories follow the INVEST model or something similar. Independent Stories have to be as independent as possible. The simple reason is that dependent stories cannot be prioritized. The customers (via the PO) should be always able to say what is more important and what is less. Dependent stories are also smuggling waterfall into scrum as I already mentioned in  Agile Killers .  Negotiable The story describes what the user wants. What is the value to the user. There have to be a space for collaborative discussion between the PO (customer's proxy) and the dev team. Valuable Each story should bring a business...