The Scrum Team Composition

By Steve Miller

Many of us have experienced projects that drag on much longer than expected and cost more than planned. Companies looking to improve their software development processes are now exploring how Agile can help their Enterprise more reliably deliver software quickly, iteratively and with a feature set that hits that mark. While Agile has different "flavors", Scrum is one process for implementing Agile. This newsletter is one in a series of newsletters that will discuss the Agile Scrum process and will end with variants of Scrum that can be used to aid in improving your software releases.

Team Composition

Managing Scrum development requires a major change in how teams work together. In traditional Waterfall development, teams normally have a project sponsor, a project manager, analysts, designers, programmers, testers, and documentation specialists. Each team member has specific duties which normally do not normally overlap and they have a specific reporting structure (most team members report to the project manager).

With Scrum, you have just 3 team roles and is normally limited to 7 or less individuals (however, you can have multiple Scrum teams in sets of 7 or less):

• Product Owner - This is the person that identifies and prioritizes the features that will appear in a 30 day sprint. This is normally the Product Manager, CTO, in some cases the CEO, or some other high level stakeholder that ultimately is responsible for shaping the roadmap of their product. Before a sprint begins, the Product Owner communicates the goal of the sprint to the team and what features should be analyzed for the release. This does not mean that all the desired features will make it into the sprint, the team estimates and prioritizes items for the sprint (during the Sprint Planning sessions), and only the items that can fit in the sprint are done.
• ScrumMaster - The ScrumMaster is akin to the Project Manager in Waterfall environments, but does not manage the team deliverables at a micro level. Instead, this person is responsible for ensuring that the 30 day sprint stays on course, no new features are added to the sprint, code inspections happen, and ensuring everyone plays by the rules. The ScrumMaster coordinates and runs the daily sprint meetings. The ScrumMaster is not a task master, they are a leader that empowers the team members to deliver the assigned tasks and to help eliminate roadblocks that slow them down.
• The Team - With Waterfall, a team consists of analysts, designers, testers and documentation specialists. With Scrum, each team member is empowered and expected to self-manage themselves and to participate in all duties needed to deliver a feature. This includes analysis, design, coding, testing and documentation. The Team is responsible for staying focused on assigned tasks, soliciting help as they encounter road blocks, fully testing their code, refactoring code, logging their time daily (including estimated time remaining on each task), and for checking their code daily or more often if possible.

Our Experiences with Team Composition

In our experience, it is unrealistic to assume that The Team can handle quality assurance and documentation well. We have improved the team composition to include 2 additional roles:

• Software Quality Engineer - This individual is responsible for the quality of the sprint. In our experience, programmers do not test code with the same mentality as a Software Quality Engineer (SQE). Once specific requirements are defined, the SQE develops a set of test cases (manual or automated) to test each requirement fully. Before coding begins, the test cases are made available to the programmers on the team. The programmers are expected to run each test case before marking coding as being complete. Once a requirement is marked as being complete, the SQE is responsible for running the test cases again to ensure they all pass. The SQE also runs a weekly regression to ensure that legacy features are not compromised by the release. If the SQE has developed automated test cases for regression, those are run daily or more frequently, if needed. The SQE does not wait until the end of the sprint to begin testing, they test once a requirement is completed. By the end of the sprint, all testing has been done and regression has been run frequently.
• Documentation Specialist - The Documentation Specialist (DS) is responsible for creating User Guides, Administrator Guides and other training materials. In our experience, programmers do not always have the written communication skills to write documentation in a way that a laymen can interpret it, that is why it is important to have a separate resource for this function. Once a requirement has been fully tested by the SQE, the DS begins the documentation of that requirement. The DS does not wait until the end of the sprint to begin this, the end of the sprint includes all completed documentation.

6 Tips for Good Scrum

by Martin Harris

I went along to the London Scrum User Group yesterday evening.  For a change it was a quiet night.  Christmas is around the corner so we had less attendees.  Nigel Baker of AgileBear kicked off and suggested putting together 15 tips for good scrum.  After some discussion, we came up with 6 good ones, and in true Agile style, we decided that if you did these 6 well, you would be in front of the pack.  So we stopped there and got on with eating the snacks and drinking the beer.  So here is what the group came up with, look at your team and ask yourself if your doing these, if not, perhaps its time for a scrum experiment?

The London Scrum Groups 6 Good Scrum Tips

• Love your product owner. The group agreed that the product owner should be part of the team. Include them in the meetings and get them involved. Its possibly the most important thing you can do for success in scrum. A fully integrated product owner will spot early on if the stories do not match their expectations. They negotiate the definition of done for a story. They are on hand to answer questions during the iteration removing waste and improving understanding of the stories. The product owner decides if the team has finished stories at the demo. Working closely with the product owner can avoid going adrift and missing your goals, saves a lot of stress when things hit a rough patch as they get to see the problems first hand. We agreed that this point can not be understated, if you do nothing else do this.
• Run Retrospectives. Its very important to take actions away from a retrospective.  Be realistic though, your never going to solve them all, so ask the team to priorities them.  If your doing the retrospective right your product owner will be there to help with prioritization.  If you find something very big lands at the top, split it down into stories.  Otherwise pick one or two that the team feel strongly about and turn them into stories.  Make sure these stories are included in the next game planning sessions and make it into the iterations.  If you have adjustments to the process you can implement these straight away, but experiment with it, and try to measure the impact of changes, you might not get the process right first time.  Commit to doing them and then deliver.
• Ask your team to Pair Code. The XP technique of two programmers working on the same task.  It was agreed that there are different kinds of pair coding and that they all have a place, but the one we are talking about here is where two equal programmers work together to improve quality and throughput.  Don’t be dogmatic, let the team decide how much work should be pair coded.
• Setup Self Directed teams. Self directed teams have been proven to be more efficient.  We discussed the role of a scrum master in a self directed team.  Its very important that the scrum master does not tell the team how to work, or how to go about completing the tasks.  The scrum master does not plan or allocate tasks.  The empowered team needs to work out what the tasks are and find out how to finish the stories.  The scrum master should spend his efforts removing blocks for the team, checking quality.  Its important for the team and scrum master to spot if someone is not completing their work for whatever reason, but a strong team will sort out those kinds of issues if truly self directed.  We also decided that to be empowered you need to make the team multi discipline.  Include testers, user interface designers etc to remove hand off waste and increase team knowledge.  With role diversity comes better decision making.
• Deliver what you commit to. Another gem, it sounds obvious but is so often ignored.  Delivering builds trust in the team and the process.  Classic ways to miss delivery include: Failing to produce a strong definition of done.  The definition should include the programming, integration, testing and setup tasks.  In fact everything required to get that task ready for delivery.  Another way to miss delivers is to fail to demonstrate at the end of the iteration.  You may think your done, but when the product owner sees the work for the first time they may request refinement.  If you have kept your product owner close then the demo is likely to be painless.  No power-point slides please, only real working software in the demo!  So commit and then deliver what you commit to.
• Co-locate your team. The group defined co-location quite tightly.  Co-location is not putting everyone in the same office.  Its putting the team members next to each other in the same space.  Intra team communication does not happen with the team scattered around an office.  You should be able to turn around and join the stand up meeting.  This closeness, speeds up the myriad of tiny important messages that pass around the team.  Some of which is non verbal.

After this rich discussion we gave up on the 15 tips idea.  If your doing these, then your doing very well indeed, and are likely to get better over time.

So another excellent meeting, a few more beers and I headed home enlightened, well fed and slightly merry.  Why not come along to the next one, we could use your input.

7 Tips for Improving Daily Scrum

by Artem Marchenko

Daily Scrum also known as daily standup meeting is an important element of the Scrum process. The structure of the meeting is quite rigid and fixed. Everybody has to stand up, meeting should take no longer, than 15 minutes and everybody should answer three questions: "What did you do since the last meeting?", "What are you going to do until the next meeting?", "What impedes you from being more productive?". The purpose of this rigidness is for making sure that daily Scrum is to help team members synchronize between themselves, not to solve problems.

Things to watch during the daily standups are:

1. Standup means stand up, no sitting, really.
Standing up on the daily Scrum draws attention to the brevity of the meeting. The purpose of the meeting is synchronization and no lengthy problem solving. Standing helps to remember that problem solving except the smallest one has to be taken offline - nobody likes to stand for an hour while two guys are arguing about the protocol implementation details.

2. Keep it short. 15 minutes max.
Everybody can spend 15 minutes a day on synchronizing with the others. Especially if it happens to be immediately before or right after the lunch time. Spending half an hour is a very different story. In my experience most of the time the 5-6 person teams are usually done in just 7-10 minutes.

3. Stand in front of the visual progress artifact.
Ideally in front of the task board together with the product and sprint backlog. Visuality and tangibility help discussing things. If task board is used, developers often like waving hands towards the card being currently discussed or even move the cards during this meeting.

4. Everybody should be present.
One of the main reasons for meeting live is to utilize as wide communication bandwidth as possible - people are known to communicate more effectively, when meeting live. If particular team member is unable to participate, another person should report on behalf of his/her. If it is impossible for some reason, catch up later.

5. No typing.
Holding a laptop and making notes is power. The one who types immediately starts looking as a manager and often subconsciously starts writing what he thinks was meant, not what team members actually said. If you need notes, take micro-notes by hand.

6. Concentrate on the second and third question, not on the first one.
What's done is more of a context for the second and third questions. The real point is to figure out what's blocking the efficient work and who could help it.

7. If team talks too much to ScM, tell him not too look at the team.
Daily standup is for synchronizing between the team members, not between Scrum Master and the team. If team members start behaving as they are reporting to Scrum Master, he can start literally looking at another person or even walk away a little. Such small tricks are often able to confirm that daily Scrum is for the team members and not for the Scrum Master.

Daily Scrum is a powerful tool, but as any other tool it is good, when you know what it's useful for and have some experience in using it. The above seven simple tips can be good starting points or reminders. However, every team knows best how to adjust its standups to serve them better. The important part is the goal, not the method.