Journey of organizing a SCRUM-TEAM of an amateur scrum-master (P1)

Tram Ho

You are a somewhat stiff member and have just joined the company. One beautiful day, you are called by the leader and assigned a task … “supporting a development team in the company to develop software according khung làm việc scrum ” developed by the partner. The software will follow the scrum framework and the partner will send people to work as a PO (right away !!?).

Equivalent to me being nominated as a Scrum-master for this scrum-team. I was chosen because I have been in many scrum-teams during my “hire” career. I have a few weeks to prepare what I need (including taking some courses – “west” yes, “ta” also). It seems that this first information will be funny for you / your professional scrum-master, but this is an opportunity and my new career-path, of course I accepted the “boss” to do. and now I am a “good” SM with some scrum.org certificates to hand .

The following articles I will share with you, the short journey that I and the first scrum-team in the company have fought together to build a strong team, a premise for other teams in the industry. The company moved from waterfall to scrum.

Select materials to learn and train about scrum.

To start building a scrum team, you have to start training your team about scrum, understanding the fundamentals of the Scrum framework. After a few working turns (sprint), the optimal gradually.

Scrum / Agile documents are quite large, both video training and ebooks, paper books, but for a new Scrum team to let you read / view documents in English is quite a big challenge.

Fortunately for me, at that time, there were 2 books in Vietnam written in Vietnamese:

The SCRUM Handbook for Beginners – by the Agile Academy authors

and Aglie Y – by Nguyen Van Hien.

I reread the two books over and over again for 3 days, taking a tight note with a thick book about what I plan to train / explain to my colleagues. Each concept will try to give a few examples. At first, my interpretation was quite confusing, based on the headings of the “SCRUM Handbook”; Later, I corrected and proposed the titles based on the order AZ (Glossary).

You can refer to the “standard” glossary at: https://www.scrum.org/resources/scrum-glossary .

After this, there was an online course by the Agile Academy membership group on the Kyna site (now found unavailable), which was quite complete and easy to understand. If you are interested, please contact the author directly.

Select the method of presenting the work.

After a few “theoretical” sessions with my colleagues introducing SCRUM, we started to set up the team work. The first is to choose how to display “transparency” of work among team members at each time. For example, HR A can know what B has done the most recently (already), what he is currently doing and what he will do next.

At first we chose to use Trello, each trello card is a job, each board is a backlog (Sprint Backlogs, Product Backlogs, …). After a while, the use of Trello has some limitations, mainly related to the fact that each trello card does not show all the needs that PO wants such as displaying epic; work content, comments that do not support WYSIWYG; test-case must be managed externally; The function of the card that is “too big” to break is not able to link them together; After each sprint, the scrum-master must add the story-point by himself, draw the burn-down chart out ….

After the reference time of other companies, we switched to using Jira. It’s a pleasure that the functions Jira provides are beyond expectations. Thanks to Jira, my SM job becomes a lot softer (of course, its price is also quite “harsh”).

Physical tools for work.

For meetings (scrum specialties), we need to prepare a table that can be written and deleted. The placement of this board must also be special, so that the team members can … stand or sit around. Can choose the type of board … legs to easily move when needed “closed meeting”. If a board is available, a pen must be written, the more colors the better.

Lots of colorful sticky notes and notes for members to take notes (if necessary).

A special set of poker-planning cards with cards numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20 … (fibonaci sequence) made specifically for scrum-team to work. show job estimates. If you cannot buy this deck, you can print and paste the numbers yourself on regular decks.

Some “toys”, funny stickers to play the game, to remember, ….

Thoroughly grasp common thoughts.

The most difficult thing about starting a new team in any type of software development is “ideology”. Each member of the team is an individual … and “one person to one”, how most people will have the same perspective with the upcoming products and work. In Scrum, there are 5 values ​​that team members need to understand together to develop together.

brave

In order for a person to dare to speak out about their problems and accept so many types of risks when changing commitments, they need to be brave .

Basically, other values ​​are not possible if you do not have the courage.

Concentrate

Everyone needs to focus on their work within the Sprint and the Team Sprint Goal .

Once the development team ** has committed ** to the sprint work, they need to focus on fulfilling what they have committed.

Commitment

Each member commits to the other members about what he or she does and the work that has been selected at the Sprint Planning session.

Also we are constantly improving ie changing to become a better individual, better team and better organization. Wanting to improve requires change and making change is always very difficult. So only with our commitment can we do better things.

Open

Everything needs to be clear and transparent so everyone can work effectively.

Software development is complex, one cannot see and understand all the problems.

Therefore, if people are not open to each other, the information is heavily concealed and the work efficiency is difficult to improve

To respect

When disrespectful , it’s hard for people to be honest in sharing.

For example, a person does not know something, when asking others. Respondents instead of wanting to help so that the better and more independent questioners complain and evaluate the questioner (with the third person or in front of the questioner), even if they get real help but the next time it will be difficult for the person who asks will be open and truthful. No respect, hardly open


Receive an invitation from a “roommate” for writing articles under the MayFest event. I do not know much to write so I will share some of my personal experience in implementing the Scrumt team. Hopefully, new friends to scrum will know where to start.

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Source : Viblo