What is Scrum?

During today’s standup, we focus on learning all about Scrum as Joe is back (!!!), Allen has to dial the operator and ask to be connected to the Internet, and Michael reminds us why Blockbuster failed.

If you didn’t know and you’re reading these show notes via your podcast player, you can find this episode’s show notes in their original digital glory at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode155 where you can also jump in the conversation.

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Do You Even Scrum?

Why Do We Call it Scrum Anyways?

Comes from the game of Rugby. A scrummage is when a team huddles after a foul to figure out their next set of plays and readjust their strategy.

Why is Scrum the Hot Thing?

• Remember waterfall?
  • Plan and create documentation for a year up front, only to build a product with rigid requirements for the next year. By the time you deliver, it may not even be the right product any longer.
  • Waterfall works for things that have very repeatable steps, such as things like planning the completion of a building.
  • It doesn’t work great for things that require more experimentation and discovery.
• Project managers saw the flaw in planning for the complete “game” rather than planning to achieve each milestone and tackle the hurdles as they show up along the way.
• Scrum breaks the deliverables and milestones into smaller pieces to deliver.

The Core Tenants of Scrum

• Having business partners and stakeholders work with the development of the software throughout the project,
• Measure success using completed software throughout the project, and
• Allow teams to self-organize.

Scrum Wants You to Fail Fast

• Failure is ok as long as you’re learning from it.
• But those lessons learned need to happen quickly, with fast feedback cycles.
• Small scale focus and rapid learning cycles.
• In other words, fail fast really means “learn fast”.

It’s super important to recognize that Scrum is *not* prescriptive. It’s more like guardrails to a process.

An Overview of the Scrum Framework

• The product owner has a prioritized backlog of work for the team.
• Every sprint, the team looks at the backlog and decides what they can accomplish during that sprint, which is generally 2-3 weeks.
• The team develops and tests their solutions until completed. This effort needs to happen within that sprint.
• The team then demonstrates their finished product to the product owner at the end of the sprint.
• The team has a retrospective to see how the sprint went, what worked, and what they can improve going forward.

Focusing on creating a completed, demo-able piece of work in the sprint allows the team to succeed or fail/learn fast.

Projects are typically comprised of three basic things: time, cost, and scope. Usually time and cost are fixed, so all you can work with is the scope.

There are Two Key Roles Within Scrum

• Project owner – The business representative dedicated 100% to the team.
  • Acts as a full time business representative.
  • Reviews the team’s work constantly to ensure the proper deliverable is being created.
  • Interacts with the stakeholders.
  • Is the keeper of the product vision.
  • Responsible for making sure the work is continuously sorted per the ongoing business needs.
• The Scrum master – Responsible for helping resolve daily issues and balance ongoing changes in requirements and/or scope.
  • This person has a mastery of Scrum.
  • Also helps improve internal team processes.
  • Responsible for protecting the team and their processes.
    • Balances the demands of the product owner and the needs of the team.
    • This means keeping the team working at a sustainable rate.
  • Acts as the spokesperson for the entire team.
  • Provides charts and other views into the progress for others for transparency.
  • Responsible for removing any blockers.

Project owner focuses on what needs to be done while the Scrum master focuses on how the team gets it done.

Scrum doesn’t value heroics by teams or team members.

Scrum is all about Daily Collaboration

• Whatever you can do to make daily collaboration easier will yield great benefits.
• Collocate your team if possible.
• If you can’t do that, use video conferencing, chat, and/or conference calls to keep communication flowing.

The Team Makeup

• You must have a dedicated team. If members of your team are split amongst different projects, it will be difficult to accomplish your goals as you lose efficiency.
• The ideal team size is 5 to 9 members.
• You want a number of T-shaped developers.
  • These are people can work on more than one type of deliverable.
• You also need some “consultants” you may be able to call on that have more specialized/focused skillsets that may not be core members of the team.

Team Norms

• Teams will need to have standard ways of dealing with situations.
  • How people will work together.
  • How they’ll resolve conflicts.
  • How to come to a consensus.
  • Must have full team buy-in and everyone must be willing to hold each other accountable.

Agree to disagree, but move forward with agreed upon solution.

Product Vision

• It’s the map for your team, it’s what tells you how to get where you want to go.
  • This must be established by the project owner.
• The destination should be the “MVP”, i.e. the Minimum Viable Product.
  • Why MVP? By creating just enough to get it out to the early adopters allows you to get feedback early.
  • This allows for a fast feedback cycle.
  • Minimizes scope creep.
• Must set the vision, and then decompose it.

Break the Vision Down into Themes

• Start with a broad grouping of similar work.
• Allows you to be more efficient by grouping work together in similar areas.
• This also allows you to think about completing work in the required order.

Once You’ve Identified the Themes, You Break it Down Further into Features

If you had a theme of a User Profile, maybe your features might be things like:

• Change password,
• Setup MFA, and
• Link social media.

To get the MVP out the door, you might decide that only the Change Password feature is required.

Resources We Like

• Scrum: The Basics (LinkedIn)
• Manifesto for Agile Software Development (agilemanifesto.org)
• Epics, stories, themes, and initiatives (Atlassian)
• Bad Software Engineering KILLED Cyberpunk 2077’s Release (YouTube)

Tip of the Week

• Learn and practice your technical writing skills.
  • Online Technical Writing: Contents, Free Online Textbook for Technical Writing (prismnet.com)
    • Examples, Cases & Models (prismnet.com)
• Using k9s makes running your Kubernetes cronjobs on demand super easy. Find the cronjob you want to run (hint: :cronjobs) and then use CTRL+T to execute the cronjob now. (GitHub)
• Windows Terminal is your new favorite terminal. (microsoft.com)
  • What is Windows Terminal? (docs.microsoft.com)
• TotW redux: GitHub CLI – Your new favorite way to interact with your GitHub account, be it public GitHub or GitHub Enterprise. (GitHub)
  • Joe previously mentioned the GitHub CLI as a TotW (episode 142)
• Grep Console – grep, tail, filter, and highlight … everything you need for a console, in your JetBrains IDE. (plugins.jetbrains.com)
• Use my_argument:true when calling pwsh to pass boolean values to your Powershell script.
• JetBrains allows you to prorate your license upgrades at any point during your subscription.

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