Moving to the Battlefield...
Hola! Kalispera! Today is my second day in Athens. Worth saying how amazing the experience is being so far! And the weather is contributing! (And the food!)
Yesterday I mentioned about the idea of incrementing value by delivering user stories in small chunks over this post: http://agilein31days.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/incrementally-provide-incremental.html
We had no option today to move our thoughts to a real scenario. And It was also a great opportunity to move ourselves to the battlefield since it was the last day of the sprint. Time to start over and inspect what happened...
Yesterday I mentioned about the idea of incrementing value by delivering user stories in small chunks over this post: http://agilein31days.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/incrementally-provide-incremental.html
We had no option today to move our thoughts to a real scenario. And It was also a great opportunity to move ourselves to the battlefield since it was the last day of the sprint. Time to start over and inspect what happened...
We took a breath, we had an espresso freddo and then we started inspecting/adapting from particular examples.
We tried to find a valid 'waterfall' story from the previous sprint to proceed with the first observations. "What would have we done if we had taken this story now?". "Can we take into consideration an incremental delivery approach?".
Eureka! Two members of the team started drafting in which way we could have done a different - and more sensible - break down of tasks to allow us incrementing value. Can we perhaps look at the requirements and provide the delivery of the story by bringing independent smaller units of functionality? Yes, we could. The user story was divided into 4 smaller and incremental pieces. Can we unit test this part in isolation? Are any of those parts consistent enough? Yes. Yes. Funny thing is that at the end of the "drafting", the break down was a perfect representation of what the acceptance criteria.
We tried to find a valid 'waterfall' story from the previous sprint to proceed with the first observations. "What would have we done if we had taken this story now?". "Can we take into consideration an incremental delivery approach?".
Eureka! Two members of the team started drafting in which way we could have done a different - and more sensible - break down of tasks to allow us incrementing value. Can we perhaps look at the requirements and provide the delivery of the story by bringing independent smaller units of functionality? Yes, we could. The user story was divided into 4 smaller and incremental pieces. Can we unit test this part in isolation? Are any of those parts consistent enough? Yes. Yes. Funny thing is that at the end of the "drafting", the break down was a perfect representation of what the acceptance criteria.
Why we didn't that in the first place? Because it is difficult, it requires maturity but is this where we would like to be?
As usual, we also introduced a few games.
The Broken Telephone so they were communicating their vision one to another until it went back to the original transmitters. Mr. P and Mr. S explained their vision to Mrs. K and Mr. G. Then K and G explained it to Mr. E and Mr. St who finally returned the message back to the first members - Mr. P and Mr. S. The message remained with the essences of the incremental approach and it almost kept the vision intact. So it was great to see how it was nicely shared across the members. It turned up that this ended up being a good Leandro Herrero's ViralChangeTM infection example and an awesome illustration of team communication.
What was my role? I was interrupting them randomly. Leaving the room, entering again, bringing people, taking people out of the room, shouting, cleaning up elements from the whiteboard, throwing up objects... Just making their "sprint" / "user story" part of the real Scrum life :-)
As usual, we also introduced a few games.
The Broken Telephone so they were communicating their vision one to another until it went back to the original transmitters. Mr. P and Mr. S explained their vision to Mrs. K and Mr. G. Then K and G explained it to Mr. E and Mr. St who finally returned the message back to the first members - Mr. P and Mr. S. The message remained with the essences of the incremental approach and it almost kept the vision intact. So it was great to see how it was nicely shared across the members. It turned up that this ended up being a good Leandro Herrero's ViralChangeTM infection example and an awesome illustration of team communication.
A real whiteboard battlefield :)
What was my role? I was interrupting them randomly. Leaving the room, entering again, bringing people, taking people out of the room, shouting, cleaning up elements from the whiteboard, throwing up objects... Just making their "sprint" / "user story" part of the real Scrum life :-)
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