His Scrum Master's Voice

Why is this crazy person telling me to limit my WIP? As an agile coach I often come across situations where I need to encourage teams to reduce the amount of work they have in progress . Even though it sounds and feels counter intuitive to do less work, the fact is your team will get more DONE by doing fewer things at the same time. Activity != Progress In our scrum teams we naturally tend towards keeping everybody busy. Developers working on development tasks, testers working on testing tasks. History has skewed our mental model of what people should do at work so that we feel like we should always be busy, always processing work.  This is a good model for the mass production of widgets or the processing of mountains of paperwork BUT a bad model for the production of complex, functional, high quality software. We use user stories to represent units of complex, functional, high quality software and in scrum the game is to finish a number of these units every spr

In my last post about daily stand up meetings dated(2011!!) I mentioned the standard format these typically take: What did you do yesterday? What do you plan to do today? Do you have any blockers or impediments We are all familiar with the approach. However, I often see teams losing focus of their progression against sprint goals due to executing the stand up poorly.  If you find that going "round table" for individual updates is not providing any clarity on the progress of stories then it might be time for a change. Take this example: Yesterday, I had some meetings. I caught up with my emails and i had a dentist appointment in the afternoon Today I will catch up with Jane & Mike about Project Dilbert No blockers The format is correct  BUT the content was of little or no value. Why? Because the update was not pertaining to any of the user stories in the sprint and the progress being made towards its completion. My previous post states that we sh