From books – we believe that ‘Agile’ is referred to as a set of practices or methods which are based on the values and principles. Agile helps to improve communication among self-organized, cross-functional teams working in a collaborative environment. ‘Scrum’ is a framework used to implement Agile development. A Scrum Team is a collection of individuals working together to deliver the required product increments. The Scrum team includes the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development team.
A few months back, I received a chance to attend a Scrum Master training program and I should say, it had nearly changed my idea on responsibilities for this post. Till then, I was in a dilemma that SM (Scrum Master) was a team role, responsible for ensuring the team lives in agile values and principles and follows different processes anywhere in the project (at the beginning, towards the end, in documents or like as we all do, while pitching the project at sales point). Some of my previous scrum projects didn’t have stand-ups, retrospectives, etc. All team members were in one particular view – complete the project in the provided time. Later, I came across some masters in this field, who shared their thoughts on how a project lives on Agile. You need to do all the stuff needed for a normal scrum + if needed, work on the waterfall model to complete the project. As a fact, somehow or other, every project was moving from the scrum to waterfall or another traditional model even though it has standups, retrospectives, ticketing tools, and client satisfaction. Of Course, if a project has all the success factors together with Client satisfaction, no one cares whether the project was completed in agile or waterfall.
Back to my training program, it was a group of 60 members. The tutor first gave us a paper to fill our main hobby. Then he asked to create a group with common interests. I got into a team of 6 members. There were a total of 10 teams. Then he gave us a game to start the program. This game was to increase the count of some plastic balls. Each team has got 6 balls. Instructions were like, Each team needs to rotate 6 balls to nonadjacent hands for a time of 1 minute. If we pass each ball through all the six hands the count will be 1. The ball must be in the air for some time while passing. Also, there will be 1 min for planning before starting the game.
All my team members were strangers. We started to plan the game. Every team must stick a Pre-planned number to the board nearby. As we were new to this game, we planned and voted for 6 and pasted on the board. All the 10 teams wrote a different number based on their plan. Our strategy was to pass the ball with a max interval in the air of half a second. We had succeeded in that plan. After completing the 6 rounds, we had less than half a minute. We played for the balance time and completed another 4 rounds. We had completed 10 rounds with that ball. He told us to play again – this time, we knew our team and its strength. We had more confidence and ended up with 20 rounds while the pre-planned number was 14. He wants more from us, So we again changed the strategy. For 3rd round – we wrote 40 and ended up in 30 rounds. We had failed in that plan. We re-evaluated the plan, worked on other strategies, found team member weakness and changed the plan accordingly. That time we played well. Marked 40 and got 65 rounds…Wow!! Great increase. The tutor came with another announcement. One of his former batch fellows had completed 250 rounds with that balls. We again came back to the seats, changed all the strategies again, planned and practiced the game in that 1 minute. Finally, the bell rang. We all played very well. But unfortunately, we hit 125. In between some balls went down too. We lost that game.
The guy then started explaining the game which made our concepts clear for Scrum Master.
The tutor was running an end to end project. First of all – he built a team with special interests and named a project. As per the process, all the scrum projects will have a Scrum master – who tells the team, what to do with the tasks. A Scrum Team who SM and tells all the possible ways of winning the game, fights inside the team and supports for a common goal within the team. A Product Owner – who tells the team what he needs (the tutor himself). Everything was in a timebox model. First PO provides his demands. 1 minute for the plan and 1 minute for execution. We had our standup meeting for 1 minute to work with plans, fights, checking for strength & weakness, etc. Every time, we are measuring ourselves based on the previous tasks which say there is no type of estimation for the scrum methodology. It will be evaluated based on the weightage of previous tasks and also on user stories. Whenever we were executing our plans, we were re-discovering with different ways to improve the tasks. Finally, he gave the 250 number – which is impossible for a person in the world within that particular time. But then also, all the 10 groups have tried and failed. The final game was to make us think that, sometimes everyone needs to say ‘NO’ to particular projects or tasks which the customer assigns and needs to deliver the project with Quality(without dropping a single ball).
