Let's break the Artificial Agility

Recently my manager called me for a meeting and said, I don't see the Agile and Scrum works as the way it should be. What do you think ? I feel its a time to break the process and come up with what works for us. Yes. I agreed what he said. Not being a full time scrum master what happens to you is that, you will also be part of the usual crowd and down the line you will be travelling out of track without realizing seeing what is going wrong. Sometimes its not the case that you don't know or you didn't feel it but you might not have got a chance to pay attention to it.

Coincidentally it happened that, I see one of the GOTO conference where it is titled as "Agile is Dead". Yes, now I remember that I read and shared one of Dave Thomas's post in LinkedIn saying "Agile is Dead". Mr.Dave Thomas is one of the member who has drafted the Agile Manifesto. Though I happened to see this from one of the related videos I ended up into the right one. If the creator of the Agile Manifesto thinks that "Agile is Dead", then what will you say ? Let all the commercial Agile coaches say that "Agile is not Dead". I don't mind.

What to do now ? I too still believe the "Agile Manifesto". How to bring the true Agility into everyone in the team ? Before finding answers to these questions I thought lets take a step back and think about what we are doing now and what we are missing here ?

• We are doing the Sprint Planning meeting.
• We are doing the scrum meeting throughout the iteration with the standard format of questions.

What did you do before we meet ?

What are you planning to do till we meet next ?

Was there any impediments ?

• Finally push everyone for the Demo during the Sprint Review and force them to provide feedback during the retrospective.

By listing down these scrum practices, what I felt is that we are artificially Agile. Means that, the team does certain things considering Agile as a process. Now its time for me to break this and bring the Agility in the team and making each and everyone of the scrum team member more Agile.

Here is the first draft I came up with as a start. Let me do this. Make mistakes, Learn and correct it. That is Agile isn't it ?

Sprint Planning

I am not going to stop this. Let's tweak this a bit. I don't need scrum poker to do the estimation of the tasks. Let each member of the team tell how many days they think it should be ideal and decide collaboratively on the final estimate. Before estimate each member of the team should be clear on what the Product Owner or the Business Analyst expect out of the story. This has to be done during the backlog refinement or during the planning itself. If you are not clear ask now. I am not going to take this in the retrospective if you are not clear. Again during the iteration if the developer is not clear, be Agile physically as well. Go around and catch the Product Owner or Business Analyst and clarify.

Scrum Meetings

Now you have committed to deliver a product increment or bug fixes.Let's break the format of the stand-up meeting. I am not going to restrict the team with three standard questions and answers to that.

Let's gather and tell the team that, what you did ?

How you did that ?

Were you make mistakes ?

What did you learn from the mistakes and what you have planned to do to stop same kinds of mistake ?

What you are planning to do today and how ?

Were you completed some product increment or a bug fix ?

If Yes, Have you delivered it ? How did you deliver ? Any issues with Devops process How did you handle it ?

Did you go around to different stakeholders to clarify your questions or solve problems ? Be Agile physically as well.

Lets start with these or add more based upon your environment or problems you face.I know this is not going to finish it with in 15 mins. If you find this format as beneficial then do the stand-up in alternate days to save time and get the best out of the daily stand-up or commitment meeting.

Sprint Review

No dedicated end of the Sprint Review meetings.

Did you finish with the product increment ? Let's ask your scrum master to schedule a meeting with your Product Owner or Business Analyst. Give a demo and collect the feedback.

Were your delivery is as expected ? If the answer is Yes then no action required.

Were the output is slightly deviating from what is expected ? If yes, discuss and clarify what went wrong. Did the Product Owner or Business Analyst didn't communicate well or you failed to understand right ? Whoever it is take actions for not making the same mistakes.

Were your delivery is completely different from what is expected ? This can be a very rare scenario. Please review and discuss what went wrong and take actions.

Sprint Retrospective

I am not going to collect any post-it cards to discuss about "What could have been done better ?". As a scrum master, I am going to compile the logs of what is shared by each team member during the daily stand-up meetings and Demo/Review meetings and let each one of them describe how did they make mistakes and corrected it. How did each one of them worked with Devops team, Product Owner and Business Analyst to solve the problems with release, user stories etc.

In a summary what it means is that, if this has to work then each team member should be as Agile as possible.