Behold! The ScrumMaster comes!
One recent event I haven’t blogged about is that I was recently asked to be ScrumMaster by my manager. That sounds sorta like a title from a D&D game gone horribly wrong, but once you know what it is, it’s not that bad. It may help to know that Scrum is a methodology for developing software, and is not unlike what Scrum is in Rugby, which is where it got it’s name.
It’s been about a month, and the first sprint under my watch is almost over and I can say that things have gotten better. While it’s true that, once again, we aren’t going to get everything done that we scheduled for this sprint, we are going to accomplish the goal that our manager has set for us and that is something new.
While I have some issues to what ScrumMaster means at my employer, I’m not going to talk about that aspect. I do want to talk about how I tried to make this sprint go better:
- Our daily meetings were generally about 30 minutes, sometimes 45 and, once in a while, a whole hour! The first thing I did was to shorten them. They are generally now 15 minutes, sometimes 20, and are only about what people just finished or what they are working on now. Any strategy talk is now done outside of the daily meeting.
- I have told everyone that, if they have questions or problems let me know. And I always follow up — even at the expense of my own tasks. This has made people feel that they can ask questions and get help, so no one is sitting around for a day waiting for help to come.
- I’ve been trying to instill in people’s minds that having two or three easy tasks completed is better than having one hard task half-done. Getting those easy, little things done and out of the way helps build the rhythm that an agile development team so desperately needs.
I do want to do things differently next sprint. I really think we need to do two week sprints instead of four, but management overruled that. Instead, we have compromised on three weeks, which is still shorter. And, while we generally have one overall goal, we always have a ton of tasks that have nothing do to with the goal of the sprint. While it’s true they all need to be done, it takes some of the focus from our immediate goal (that’s why I want to do two week sprints –so all we can focus on is our goal). I am going to make that that better in our next sprint.