The Agile School

The PDCA (Plan DO Check Act) cycle was made popular by Dr. W. Edwards Deming. This is a scientific cyclic process which can be used to improve the process (or product). This is cyclic in nature and usually time boxed. Plan  This is the first stage of the process. During this step the team discusses the objectives, the process and the clear conditions of exit (conditions of acceptance). This stage sets the measurable and achievable goals for the team. DO Team works together to achieve the objective set in the planning phase. Team works with the set of agreed process. Check Once the implantation is done team regroups and verifies the output and compares it to the agreed conditions of acceptance decided during the planning phase. The deviation, if any, is noted down. ACT If any deviation in planned tasks is observed during the Check stage, a root cause analysis is conducted. Team brainstorms and identifies the changes required to prevent such deviations in future. Team also

Measuring the individual performance in a scrum world is a very difficult proposition; in fact it is a paradox. Last day I had an interesting discussion on this with few scrum masters. One of the scrum master had a rating sheet which was updated after every sprint. There were points for scrum master, product owner & team. It was something like the following table Another scrum master questioned the need of such ratings. A rating of 2.5, 4.5 or 4 doesn’t have any significance. It looks like the GPA score. If I get 9+ I will be considered brilliant; if I get less than 5 then I am a dumb, second class person. A Scrum Master with a very high score & team with low score don’t make any sense. It creates un-necessary competition.   Scrum is all about team work. It is a well-oiled machine. There is no individual superstar. Everyone has a part to play. If everyone performs their part to perfection, the full team including the SM & PO will get full marks. But I am not again

Doing release estimation for a team is always tricky especially if the team is new or has a mix of people with different skills or experiences. Traditionally project managers did the estimates and in most of the cases it was under-estimated. Usually the PM takes the help from some subject matter experts before arriving at these estimates. Team will burn the midnight oil (or lamps :D, I hope they didn’t really burn it , there were many occasions when I wanted my PM to be burnt instead. ) But with scrum the estimation is the team’s responsibility. When I talk about this concept I get a lot of questions like the below How can a bunch of people with different technical & domain skills estimate? How can we trust the estimates from team, they will always over-estimate. It is a waste of time, with so many people involved; it will be a never ending exercise. The senior folks will do the estimation & juniors will go along with it without asking any questions.  The questions