Scrum is just a continuous improvement
If you are a software developer and in an agile-oriented team, probably you have experienced something called scrum, or you do it now. Do you like it? I didn’t use to. That’s because, once every two weeks I had to commit to delivering some tickets and if I failed, I became a person to blame.
But my current understanding of scrum is not the commitment stuff, rather it’s just an iteration to improve ourselves. I will show a simple overview of the scrum which I did and also liked.
Let’s suppose that we do scrum with two weeks sprint and are on 15th Mar 2021 in the below calendar.
15th, Monday
We start a new sprint and have a Sprint Planning. What is that? That is the time we decide what we deliver during the sprint. In the product backlog, we have tickets that were refined in the previous sprint. We put points for each item to visualize its complexity. Using Scrum Poker is a common way I think. That’s available online also [Link]. If our capacity is 20 points in one sprint, then we pull tickets into the Kanban board up to 20pt and start working on them. I will say that the most important things are we know our capacity and share a common sense of what 1pt is worth.
16th, Tuesday
We have Daily Scrum in the morning. It’s a short stand-up in which we ask each member:
- What did you do yesterday?
- What will you do today?
- Are there any obstacles for you?
The third one is the most important. If someone is blocked by something, we jump in it and unblock them.
17th, Wednesday
We have a Story Grooming. This is the time we go through tickets that will be pulled into the next sprint. This time we talk about what we do, instead of how we do it. So topics are:
- Do our users need it? (Any data that implies the demand?)
- How does it make sense to us? (What is the expected outcome?)
- Do we have some data which shows our users need it?
- After delivery how do we measure the results?
If we have something obscure on some tickets, we will refine tickets and have another discussion at Story Refinement.
18th, Thursday ~ 23th, Tuesday
We keep having Daily Scrum in the morning. If someone is blocked, we unblock them with full effort.
24th, Wednesday
This day we have Story Refinement and clarify what we do with our tickets. The outcome of the meeting is that each ticket has a clear user story that satisfies INVEST (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable).
25th, Thursday
Again we have Daily Scrum, and try to deliver things as much as possible. I like the phrase “Done is better than perfect” unless we will have serious bugs.
26th, Friday
We have Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective.
In Sprint Review, we explain to stakeholders what we achieved in the Sprint and show a demo of how they work. If we couldn’t deliver something, we might need to explain why (they tend to be like unexpected issues, obscure spec or even spec changes during sprint which should never happen).
In Sprint Retrospective, we filled out docs with:
- How did actions made in the previous sprint go?
- What went well in this sprint?
- What didn’t go well in this sprint?
- What we will try next Sprint? (make actions)
If we planned we deliver 20pt tickets and we did 30pt, probably something went well so we discuss what went well and how we keep it. Or, maybe we just underestimate our tickets but in that case, we discuss how we improve our estimation. On the other hand, if we deliver only 10pt, there was something that went wrong so we discuss what went wrong and how we improve it. Don’t forget to make concrete action items for the next Sprint. That’s how we continuously improve ourselves.
That’s an iteration of the scrum. That’s not something it forces you to commit something and blame if you fail. Important things are, we know our capacity and estimate tickets accurately and see how things go and analyze results. As the title says, it’s just a continuous improvement cycle.