Motivation behind scrum meetings

Scrum meeting is just not "Standing up" ,"meet" and ask 3 questions. There is certain motivation behind this meet. While reading an article I found one of the motivation to be:

When one team member shares an obstacle in the Scrum meeting, the entire team’s resources come together to bear on that problem. Because the team is working together toward a shared goal, every team member must cooperate to reach that goal. The entire team immediately owns any one individual’s problems. [Rising and Janoff, 2000]

This is also in accordance with the lean thinking, Toyota way !!

Agile Pit fall

Even though Agile methods are supposed to reduce the risk of the project, improve the quality of the deliverables, one thing I feel which would complement agile is "measuring the quality in each step". Agile principles and values never talk about any particular "measurement", and the Agile methods who have tons of practices have not given much importance to "measurable result".

Quality

I am sure you would be using the word "quality" hundreds of times a day if you are in software industry. Even though there are various definitions of quality from various school of thoughts, for example:

Quality is conformance to requirements.

and the other one here

Quality is the capacity to remain robust and conformant, while adapting to new requirements.

.

I strongly agree with the second definition. The reason being, I can write my program to conform to requirements but what if, the design is poor ? what if the code is crappy ?

Toyota Way and the Stand up meeting

I remember somebody telling me that, in Toyota manufacturing plant and in the assembly line if somebody discovers some fault in the product, immediately they would raise an alarm. This in turn signals everybody to stop what they have been doing, and approach the person who raised the alarm. All of them in that shop floor in turn would discuss and help the person in resolving the fault he/she has seen.

I believe the same principle is being applied in our daily stand up meeting. Most of the time, the daily stand up meeting is considered as "status meeting". In fact it is not, especially if you look at the third question "Any obstacles stopping the developer from proceeding further?". The reason I believe behind this question is to make the other team members aware of this issue, and in turn all of them can jump together in helping this person out. This is in line with the Toyota manufacturing analogy shown above.

Until we don't understand the principles behind practices, practices remains as practice !!

Discussion with Craig Larman

Nowadays I am working closely with Craig to get a deeper understanding of Agile and Scrum. Here is the summary of key what I understood

1. There is nothing called agile "method". Agile provides principles and values. There are agile methods like XP,Scrum,etc

2. Most of the time people who go through scrum master certification end up becoming "Project managers having Scrum master certification"

3. Scrum Masters are obstacle removers in a project rather than managers controlling the project. I can clearly see in my surroundings, how difficult it is to achieve this particular goal. The reason being most of the people are coming from "Project Management" background !!

Becoming a scrum master is not "practicing some things", it needs total change of mindset, the way we lead life at work, the way we think.

I have started working on implementing "Virtual Lava Lamp", and it looks like a lot of configuration changes needs to be done while integrating Cruise control with lava lamp.

Good quote from Ron Jefferies

The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one.
-- John Maxwell

Why some teams hesitate to maintain charts

I was reading Jim Shores blog, and came across an article where he has recommended to put some thought process if your team hesitates to update the "Big Visible Charts". I am not going to rephrase what he already said, but going to paste his words here:

he first question to ask is, "Did the team really agree to this chart?" An informative workspace is for the team's benefit, so if team members aren't keeping a chart up to date, they may not think it's beneficial. It's possible that the team is passively-aggressively ignoring the chart rather than telling you that they don't want it.

If people won't take responsibility, perhaps you're being too controlling.

I find that when no one updates the charts, it's because I'm being too controlling about them. Dialing back the amount of involvement I have with the charts is often enough to get the team to step up to the plate. Sometimes that means putting up with not-quite perfect charts or sloppy handwriting. I like pretty charts, so that's hard for me to do... but it pays off.

Manual Testing Vs Automated Testing

I have seen posts on the web debating about ONLY in favor of automated testing. My view is we need to have a balance between the automated and manual testing. Couple of points

1. In order to have the tests automated and working with cruise control, a sort of maturity and experience is needed. I have tried implementing TDD with my team, it took really a long time for them to grasp.

2. Even if somebody is trying to automate testing, till date I have not seen anybody implementing them for the entire features. What I have observed is, developers would start writing unit tests and at some point of time, either to meet deadlines or for some reason they would skip writing tests and get into coding straight.

I always think it is a good idea to automate as many tests as possible and also keep manual testing continued.

Manual Testing Vs Automated Testing

I have seen posts on the web debating about ONLY in favor of automated testing. My view is we need to have a balance between the automated and manual testing. Couple of points

1. In order to have the tests automated and working with cruise control, a sort of maturity and experience is needed. I have tried implementing TDD with my team, it took really a long time for them to grasp.

2. Even if somebody is trying to automate testing, till date I have not seen anybody implemeting them for the entire features. What I have observed is, developers would start writing unit tests and at some point of time, either to meet deadlines or for some reason they would skip writing tests and get into coding straight.

I always think it is a good idea to automate as many tests as possible and also keep manual testing continued.