When I'm asked to work with teams, one of the first things I want to do is to observe their daily Scrum.
For me, that daily scrum becomes a very vital barometer.
It helps me to understand so many dynamics of how the team is actually interacting with each other.
I am looking to see if the daily scrum is a valuable part of their day, but I am also trying to understand some of the team intradynamics.
At this point, I want to bring something up that sometimes I've gotten some pushback on, and that is that Scrum is a team sport.
Now, I don't get pushback on people thinking that it's a team sport, but I get pushed back on the sports analogy itself.
Sometimes people get uncomfortable with sports analogies and say, hey, don know sports ball at all, so why would this make sense to me?
Trust me, you don have to know the inner dynamics of how teams actually work together in a particular sport to understand this analogy.
I'll make it simple for you.
Scrum is at its core a team sport.
It is an analogy that comes from rugby.
A scrum is part of the game of rugby and the authors of Scum deliberately chose that reference to help us to understand in a large picture view how this
should work.
it should be like a Team Sport.
It should not, for example, be like playing golf.
Right, if we're playing Golf, and let's just say even that we add the word team golf to that.
then what would happen is we'd each play our own holes, and then we would add up our total scores to see what our team score was.
So individual effort combined together to create a team approach.
That's not the kind of team sport we're talking about.
We're taking more about something like soccer, football, basketball, baseball, cricket.
Pick your favorite team's sport.
The dynamic here is people on the field at the same time with the goal, working together to accomplish that goal.
If we're playing soccer together, or as most of the world says, football, if we are playing that sport, one of very first things that any beginning coach
will say to their teams is, make sure you're talking to each other out there.
Call out to each other, call for the ball, say I've got it, yell for someone else to do something that you need them to,
communicate.
We don't need two people running into each to try to the same thing.
Well, that same dynamic should apply to how teams actually accomplish work when they use the Scrum framework.
Working together, common goal, on the field at the time.
I'll give you a little bit of an example here.
Oftentimes, this is what I see with new teams.
Let's say we have a two-week sprint.
Developers will take eight of those two weeks, eight or those 10 days, to actually do their development work.
And then at the end of it, they'll throw it over the fence to testers who then scramble because they have two days left in the sprint to actual test all
this work, Well, you can imagine how much carryover work happens in that scenario.
The testers feel responsible that they weren't able to finish all the work when it's not really their fault.
They weren' given the full two week sprint, they were given two days of the sprint to do their work.
So that's gonna work, what I like to challenge my teams with is to say, What would it take for you to get something all the way done,
matching all of your definition of done in the first two to three days of the sprint?
Now, I'm not telling them to all work done but get SOMETHING done.
How would you have to change how you work in order to accomplish something in first 2-3 days?
Well, you can imagine the answer here.
We've got to team up.
And we've gotta break our stories down to their smallest component.
Those two disciplines are at the core of how a team should be working.
Consequently, how does this relate back to the daily scrum?
Well, if my team is playing the sport like golf, then the Daily Scrums are unimportant.
I'm going to say what I did, but no one else cares because they're not doing it.
They're no working with me.
But if I am working on a team sport environment, then it's vital we talk to each other so that we don't both go after the ball at the same time.
It's viral that you know what I've done so you can accomplish your work for that day.
That's what i'm looking for when I observe the Daily Scrum.
Are we playing Scum as a Team or are we as individual contributors?
What does your team do?