I recently had a conversation with Dave, over at the Mastering Business Analysis podcast, about splitting big user stories down into smaller stories. The interview was a lot of fun and it’s available now. You can get it direct from the Mastering Business Analysis website, or point your podcatcher at one of these links:
You can also read about splitting user stories at SmallerStories.com.
Cheers,
Our own Cathy Simpson talks about how to do an agile retrospective with your scrum team in this video. The 5-step retrospective agenda she talks about comes from the book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great.
Here’s an interesting question that just came in from a local scrum master. It’s about estimating tasks and management’s role in choosing the practices that a scrum team uses.
Chris,
The team I am working with wants to do an experiment where they will stop estimating tasks in hours. Their sprint burn down will then be tasks vs. days instead of hours vs. days. The team believes that they will be successful with this and they are also thinking of creating an initial working agreement for this experiment e.g. any task that will be added will not be longer than a day of effort.
I am supporting this but somehow I have failed in explaining and convincing management. They want me to explain the benefits and the purpose of this experiment. They point to scrum books that say tasks should always be estimated in hours and a burn down chart can only be shown using hours. How do I convince management to allow the team to proceed with this experiment?
Read the full article…
I was recently asked if engineers or other members of the scrum team would get value from a Certified Scrum Product Owner workshop.
Our Certified Scrum Product Owner workshops are designed to build knowledge and skill in three main areas:
These are topics every member of a high-performing team should be versed in. Having engineers participate in product owner training helps them understand the context within which they do their engineering work, and helps them understand how to interact better with product owners around topics such as the business value of paying down technical dept.
For products that are extremely technical, engineers usually work closely with the product owner in order to define and refine the user stories. If the engineers lack story writing skills, then the resulting ‘stories’ are often little more than a restating of the architecture and technical design. The problem with this is that many of these ‘technical stories’ need to be implemented before there is anything meaningful to the stakeholders. Once those engineers have been exposed to the story writing and splitting techniques in our workshop, they are better able to define/refine stories in such a way that they stay pertinent to stakeholders at all times.
I’ll also point out that all scrum masters should take the product owner training, as scrum masters are the scrum experts who provide guidance to the scrum team and the greater organization. Frequently, the scrum master will be called upon to coach the product owners in the various skills needed to be effective in product owner role.
Cheers,
How long should our sprints be? This is a question I am frequently asked by new scrum masters and scrum teams. Here is how it showed up in my in-box recently.
After we participated in Agile Learning Labs’ Certified Scrum Master (CSM) workshop, my colleagues and I have begun practicing scrum very seriously. We chose one week as our sprint length. Some developers feel one-week sprints are too short, since we have a very strong definition of done. Delivering visible work in one week, along with all of the time in scrum meetings, is too stressful. One team member suggested increasing our sprint length to two-weeks. What are your thoughts?
Thanks for the question! The short answer is keep your sprints short; find and fix the sources of the stress you are feeling. All too frequently, when scrum uncovers a problem, we seek to change the way we are doing scrum in order to cover the problem back up. Have a look at this post about story point accounting for another example of this tendency. A better response is to address the underlying root-causes of the problem.
For your team, it is unlikely the underlying problem is not enough time in a one-week sprint to get user stories done. More likely, the team is dealing with one or more of the following problems:
Read the full article…
Here is a question that just showed up in my in-box regarding how to calculate a scrum team’s velocity when they are doing stabilization sprints. This notion of stabilization sprints has become more popular lately, as they are included in SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework).
We do a 2-week stabilization sprint every 4th sprint where we complete regression testing, etc. but don’t take any new stories. Is there a rule of thumb around including a stabilization sprint in the team’s velocity?
The purpose of tracking a scrum team’s velocity is to give stakeholders (and the team) predictability into the rate at which they will complete the planned deliverables (the stories). Velocity is the rate of delivery. The stabilization work doesn’t represent specific deliverables that the stakeholders have asked for; it is simply a cost that you are paying every 4th sprint, because you aren’t really done with the stories during the non-stabilization sprints.
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Our very own Laura Powers recently participated in Agile Open Southern California, where she was interviewed by Scott Dunn. Laura talks about the power of games to help executives understand the changes they need to make in order for their organizations to become more agile.
The video was put together by Cliff Rosa of Rosa Media Productions.
I’m facilitating a certified scrum product owner workshop today. We talked a lot about how to give product requirements guidance to the scrum team. Then I shared this video.
Many well-intentioned managers have a fundamental misunderstanding about velocity. They think it is a measure of how hard the scrum team is working or how much they are producing. Neither of these is correct. Velocity is a tool for predictability.
Because of this misunderstanding, many managers think that the team should work toward increasing their velocity. If management focuses on velocity, this will create dysfunction. Imagine that your manager wants to see the team’s velocity increase. This is very easy to achieve; the team can simply increase their story estimates over time. Velocity will climb as high as anyone wants. This won’t correlate to any change in productivity or business performance, and the manager won’t get what they wanted. Worse, the team has just lost visibility and control of their schedule. What’s a scrum master to do?
Recently, I answered a question about how to do the story point accounting when a user story spans multiple sprints. The scrum team had several user stories that were started in sprint one, but completed in sprint two. Since velocity is a measure of the rate at which the team is delivering stories, we found it best to count all the points for a story in the sprint in which it is completed.
Now let’s examine the question from the point of view of a scrum master. A scrum master’s job is to help the team improve and progress toward the goal of becoming a continuously-improving, high-performing, self-organizing, possibly-over-hyphenated scrum team.
The question is being asked because the team members are feeling some pain. They have worked hard on four stories, but only completed one. This doesn’t feel good and they are looking for a way to alleviate the pain. The quick fix is an accounting trick to give the team ‘credit’ for working on, but not delivering, their stories. This only accommodates the team’s dysfunction. A scrum master will want to help the team find and fix the root causes of the pain. In this way, they may fix the problem instead of perpetuating it.
Read the full article…