Agile Fashion

A person known to the Billboard Liberation Front, Paul Addis, was arrested for lighting the man last night. The man burned after the lunar eclipse last night. The charred remains have been removed from the foundation and a new man will be up in time for the scheduled burn on Saturday.

With this year’s theme of the Green Man, it seems appropriate that this is the year someone pulled off the age-old joke of igniting it early. An outlaw working alone, Paul pulled off something which will be remembered for some time. At least he did it early enough in the week to have it rebuilt. This year, people at the event get a 2-for-1 deal with the burn.

Checking email was the tipping point. Having two web mail accounts means that typing in mail[dot] in the Address Bar brings up both domains. I actually like Yahoo’s mail better, but the classic version. I just happen to forward the email for this domain to our competitor’s site and let them handle the spam. Maybe that’ll change now that I have the pro account with the POP access, which is given out by our competitor for free. I thought I would type in the word gmail to differentiate and was hoping just maybe, this one time, Yahoo! would be kind enough to take me to the page. When it did not I typed in the phrase “change firefox search engine” in the Firefox Search Bar.

It was nice to see the Mozilla link in first place yet it was the second one which gave me my answer, listed here as well. Strange, the database for that site just went down. Anyway, that’s not the point, neither is the fact that now when I type in gmail it takes me straight to the application. The point is somewhat about choice; getting what I want out of the applications I use. Closer to it is about how much companies are aware of consumer sentiment. I had a different intention in the use of the application, and would never click on a sponsored link. In this particular instance, there aren’t even any!

After my team’s daily stand up, I went to join the embedded team. Looking over all the tasks entered the day before I tried to figure out what feature they belonged to, writing down the task, ID, feature and hours on sticky notes. Endeavoring to finish before stand up which happens at mid day, I wasn’t even a third the way through by then. I did manage to write down impediments to put up in a visible list tomorrow but really had no idea if they were talking about the tasks entered, and no idea which feature in the white board MPP they could be speaking about.

I was able after the meeting to get people together who could remove a blocker for them to better understand how to solve the problem. This did take away from time to continue writing down the tasks on a sticky as did a couple meetings, and a foosball beating, with my team. By the day’s end I had them all down and arranged them against the MPP white board and slowly transformed it in to a Sprint Board.

Once finished, I took the Product Owner and the other Scrum Master over to show my handiwork. This board made the Product Owner tingle with excitement. Both agreed it gave a lot more insight into what was happening, which was many tasks bucketed outside of the prioritized feature list, and falling into ‘other’. Since this can be de-scoped and already the burn down looks bad, I have a little plan for tomorrow, too. I also took this opportunity to let them know that my ulterior motive was to get the prioritized Product Backlog in order, and asked if they would like help generating a Release Plan. The response was certainly positive.

The day started with an end and beginning to a Sprint. With the cycle being so short, the team was devoting 30 minutes each to review and retrospective and an entire hour for Sprint Planning. I could see where the review could handle the short length and knew planning could be short since most of it was done for the team already the day before. I was hoping as the new Scrum Master to have the chance to run the meetings, but they went on routinely and it was obvious all I should do is just listen in.

Of course, it’s difficult for me just to sit passively. I wound up briefly touching on the very, very basics of Scrum for about five minutes, basically drawing and explaining this picture. There was also a bit of a plea in solutions during Sprint Review from me to ditch some burdening process and have some visible information radiators around the room.

Even without my interjections the review lasted over an hour, with discussions of the same couple of things. Not really new or interesting information, just all agreeing on the same problems, rehashed and kicked over. Ironically, one of the problems was starting meetings on time and sticking to the time box. Even with interjections from me and others to get on with it, everyone wanted to have the last say. Somehow, it ended and we went in to planning.

The Sprint Planning I was really hoping to run. With our prioritized MPP on the white board, I thought it would be easy to first write some acceptance criteria for each, and then focus on writing tasks. We could break in to groups using the people assigned as an owner to lead them, but ensuring everyone was in agreement with the tasks and time. Instead, the Product Owner and Project Manager read through the list and their hope that it got done in the time they estimated, and then everyone left the room. Presumably to enter their tasks in the tool the team was using, but who really knows?

It took a little while to get it going, since I’ve been employed now for 6 weeks. Same as our new CEO. As a matter of fact, my orientation was cut short for an all-hands to inform us of the matter. It makes for an interesting background to my entree into this company.

For me the objective when I started was simple; shadow another coach, and find a team needing help with Scrum and embed with them. Stand ups were attended, training delivered, some work off loaded from other team members and contacts made. It was through one of these contacts I made myself that the engagement was uncovered.

I was invited to a Sprint Review and brought along another coach. Not wanting to be late for a meeting with our team, my colleague took off right after while I stuck around to speak with the Product Owner. The Scrum Master had recently vacated the spot. The Product Owner was really trying to sell me on embedding with them and seemed very open to any help.

The Scrum Master role was put on a developer, making the role his biggest impediment. Since he was thrown into it with no notice, there was the possibility the role could become one of the team’s biggest impediment. Eager to embed and ready to really feel effective, I bit at the chance.

Iterations are only a week on this team and end on Tuesdays. I joined the team the day before one ended and we agreed I’d take over the Scrum Master role starting with the next one. Trying to ditch expectations I just wanted to understand where they were at. In preparation for starting an iteration, I was invited along on a meeting to prioritize the Product Backlog.

In this meeting a subset of the team took a punch-list of all the stuff left to do for a rapidly approaching release and then assign people to it. It is almost entirely features, a true bonus. Attending were the Product Owner, a Project Manager, Team Lead, the current Scrum Master, and myself. Although the roles of User Environment Design(UED), performance, configuration management, QA are a part of the development effort, the planning does not include anyone besides coders. The Product Owner is ok with de-scoping because of date dependencies. Another plus.

At the end of the meeting we had the rest of this time mapped out on the white board, MPP style, with the help of the Project Manager. I was able to get approximate sizes on the task to help prioritize and predict completions. I now wonder what tomorrow’s Sprint Planning will be like.