An app development story in its 6th week and 5th sprint.
I’ll talk about who are we in the coming posts, until then lets jump in to the story.
27th of April, last day before the Sprint Review.
This was the first 2 week Sprint, due to having a vacation within, thus extended. Sprint 4 wasn’t great, since we were trying to test if we can send a notification to the app via new technology. Dues have ben paid with the spike, and this let us dealing with a known technology in Sprint 5, aim is to to develop couple of features to create a value-chain in the app.
However things went south, and the Parkinson’s Law have jumped in, resulting with almost finishing one week’s work. Most of the back-office features were done, means that we can update the DB, however the app couldn’t get upgraded, which brought us no visible value.
Last day of the Sprint, and I’m anxious that we’re failing. The cost of the app can’t get cut due to the contract, meaning that money is gone. If we’re ever gonna speak of ROI, the only way is to maximize the generated value. This is also another point of realization for the value commitment. Commitment means that as an SM I am here for success, and I do anything needed to let the team to reach the Product Goal. Reaching to this mindset took some time. Until now I was dealing with the teams as an Agile Coach, without having real stake for success. Yet this can be another journey’s story, From an Agile Coach to Scrum Master. Now I’m walking the two worlds.
One day prior to the event’s day, I couldn’t hold my self and start inspecting the codes to have a better understanding about what was going on. I’m not proud with this move, and if it was done to me during my software development years that’s for sure I’d not feel happy. Yet here is transparency. Github is reachable, and the codes are transparent, they’re transparent solely for this purpose, to understand what is going on with the digital app construction.
Transparency Rocks
My findings were the number of deployments from the Back-End side was interestingly low. Without a Backend code check-in, devops pipeline will not work, so meaning that there is no new API for the Front-End. More interestingly we see some progress on the Front-End, then the question is: “What does the Front-End person do so that we can see a progress?”. This was the point that I’ve realized, we were being forced to mock the services to continue, spending our energy on doing the double work. This also shows that we’re failing with the API’s feedback cycle, we just can’t know if it is working or not. Now all these have started to disrupt us, even in the development. This is an impediment.
Review 28th of April, week before the key stakeholder meeting.
If we look 3 Sprints back, team’s composition has changed, our original Back-End developer was gone and we were trying to hit the tracks with the new joiner. Second Sprint, and three weeks has passed without having an effective BE. Team composition has changed, leaving us with an ineffective team. We’re dealing with competency or low morale problems, or both. No framework can help you on this, you need to fix your team.
With Scrum, you can have a rough clue about what is going on within 2 Sprints.
For weekly Scrum, this means 2 weeks.
Go get your impediments! They’re not going to get solved by themselves.
At the Sprint Review we inspect the increment, and also looked about where we’re short, adapted the backlog with the new requirements for the same feature, feedback cycle was far from perfect condition, yet still working. Velocity wise we were sucking. Roughly half weeks work as DONE in a timescale of 2 weeks. This was a moment of regret, instead of extending the Sprint’s time box, running 2 shorter and more focused Sprints would’ve been helped us a lot more, at least we would have been knowing our problems earlier than this point.
Where is the car? Where is the money?
The deal with next Sprint, at the 6th of May we were planning to deploy the MVP to the App Stores according to our roadmap. The aim was to make the showcase to the key stakeholders with a working and usable increment. We’re creating a thing that people will benefit from it, and they’ve influence on what is going to happen. Also these people have a stake in the product, since they pay for it too. They clearly are standing in the right hand side of the stakeholder map. We need to involve them extensively, and inform actively.
Retro, 28th April 10:30-11:15, A hard one for sure.
Team was craving Mad Sad Glad, again this was a good time to let emotions speak. Started from the Glad, and then got mixed in the Sad and Mad. While everyone is trying to ensure a psychologically safe environment, the talks was still related with dissatisfaction and anxiety. Talks were mostly focused on the BackEnd’s current status and what needs to be done for the sake of the roadmap.
At the end of the retrospective, we took 2 actions,
1- Asked for the commitment of the BE developer, and a open cheque to leave without any judgements, decided to stay. (Am I still anxious? Yes! Let’s see what happens. )
2- Front-End person decided setup his laptop and try to help the Back-End.
Sprint 6 Planning, 11:15-12:30
New sprint’s name is That Wasn’t The Way since what ever happened on Sprint 5 was clearly not the way 🙂
So here we are at the Sprint 6, same goal, same features, nearly same items only added 2 minor fixes. Instead of going on from the Jira, we did the new planning with the help of a Mural and to visualized the Sprint Backlog. We focused on what is left to reach the goal and later reflected the details as screenshot to Jira.
Let’s see what is going to happen until next week, bare with me…
Cheers, weekly SM out.
