Certified Scrum Master

Certified Scrum Master  ·  Our stories
What is Technical Debt and why is it important?

Ward Cunningham first coined this metaphor called Technical Debt. He described it eloquently in an OOPLSA 1992 paper as well as documented on his Wiki. The 4 minute video of Ward describing technical debt especially in terms of software programming and in terms of the burden carried by programmers and its impact on design and agility is worth watching. The fact that software systems are complex and you learn more as you build it inherently means that a lot of upfront design might not work.  As you learn more you will need to make changes and we will have to spend time and effort to refactor work is very similar to paying interest on a financial loan.

Martin Fowler in his TechnicalDebtQuadrant Blog further categorizes the metaphor into the four quadrants. 

Imagine having a credit card and if you continue to charge it and don't pay back, interests will accrue and over time you can see your credit score reduce and there might be other dire implications. That is an example of reckless and deliberate spending. While on the other side there is prudent where as Ward speaks about in the vide, you deliver the best based on your current understanding and as you learn more you refactor. Similar to a mortgage on a house, you prudently pay down the principal and interest.

Now let's look at some examples. Although the metaphor came from Software Development, I want to start with an everyday example first. 

Example 1: Let's say you and a partner, who lives in another city or state decide to collaborate and write a book together and. you decide to use google docs to write and share your drafts. As chapters get written many a times you might find that one person might inadvertently overwrite the other person's work or make changes that might end up in rework. That's an example of technical debt. If you have ever collaborated with someone, you might know many more scenarios to add to what I have shared in this example.

Example 2:  This next examples is from my personal experience, I was an Agile and technical coach for an 80 member team working in a bank. The product was mission critical and served a very important need of onboarding clients to the bank. The changes were regulatory in nature and were part of 2-3 year effort worth of features that needed to be built to upgrade to the customer standards that the regulators wanted us to reach. These features were time bound and the product owner, stakeholder and management were pushing the developers to deliver on tough deadlines. Well what do the developers do in turn. They put design and stability to the wind and continue to bolt on feature after feature to meet the deadlines.

This worked for a year or so until the point where enough hands had built the product into something very complex and each hand that touched it left some technical issue untouched fully knowing in many cases that they could have refactored it.

The product had 4000 users around the world and one Friday, the system could not be brought up on any workstation by any user. It had become so slow to a point where it was unusable. This lead to tremendous embarrassment at all levels and was a huge incident for the bank. Imagine not being able to onboard customers so that they can conduct business with them!!!

This is a great example of reckless accumulation of technical debt to a point where the product becomes bankrupt.

I know you will be like what happened next? Well for continuing to read the story further, Head to the Engineering Practices Blog 

 

I would love to hear your feedback and comments on this article.

About the Author

Anil Jaising is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified DevOps Institute Trainer and a Certified Training from the BACK of the Room – Virtual Edition Trainer.  Anil teaches Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Advanced Scrum Master (A-CSM) workshops from Scrum Alliance  He also teaches Training from the BACK of the Room  In Room and Virtual Edition). He is also the chief product owner of a telemetry plugin At A Glance on Atlassian Jira.

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by Anil Jaising

Certified Scrum Master  ·  Our stories
Scrum Master is a Teacher, Mentor, Facilitator and Coach. What’s the difference?

You might have heard this phrase before the scrum master wears many hats. In fact Michael James has a checklist of 42 tasks that a scrum master does.

The four primary hats the scrum master wears are of a teacher, mentor, facilitator and coach.

 

A good Scrum Master switches between these hats at different times as needed by the Developers, Product Owner and Organization. Let's explore the differences between these four.

Teacher:

As a teacher one shares knowledge from books. As a teacher/trainer, in my classes I teach scrum from the scrum guide. When I work for an organization, I teach product owners and organizations how scrum works, what are expected roles, how can the organization make scrum teams successful, etc. I am teaching, I am actively sharing.

Mentor:

A Mentor shares his or her experience.  As I was working towards being a Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST®)with Scrum Alliance I was co-training with several other world class trainers. They observed my behaviors and shared their experience on how to overcome things that I should improve on and things I should do more of. As an Executive Director in one of the world's largest bank, I was frequently approached by Associates and Vice Presidents who wanted to navigate their careers, get promoted and work towards meaningful work in the bank. I mentored them and shared my stories on how I worked towards my role. Again in this hat the mentor is actively sharing.

Facilitator:

A Facilitator that makes it easy for groups to make decisions. The facilitator is a neutral party, he or she does not have any say in the decision. In my years of being a manager, trainer, coach, presenter I have used several facilitation techniques, roman voting, dot voting, fist to five, 33 techniques from liberating structures, techniques from innovation games and so many more to help my stakeholders, product owners, developers and my students come together and make decisions.

Coach:

Coaching is changing behavior of the coachee. The Coachee comes up with their own answers in a session with the coach. The coach uses techniques like active listening and asking powerful questions to guide the coachee.  In 2018, my friend Linda Fung and I were chosen to deliver a workshop for the Agile conference in San Diego. Typically these conferences have 200 people attending one session. There are multiple sessions at the same time.  I was particularly nervous, I had previously being in workshops with 50 to 100 participants, but how do I ensure that I can engage each and every participant when I have 200 people in the room. I remember the beautiful hotel, a great swimming pool area, its hot and sunny, everyone is enjoying in the pool or in the bar. Linda and I are standing in front of a laptop on one of the tables outside and practicing speaking through our slides. We see someone stop by and notice its Lyssa Adkins. Lyssa is Coach of Agile Coaches. Her book “Coaching Agile Teams” is one of the best books on Agile Coaching.

Lyssa stops by and ask us what we are doing? We tell her.

Lyssa observes us and probes further, “What will make you better prepared?” I share that although we have delivered this workshop several times but never to the a larger audience.

Lyssa continues to probe and asks us “What are you planning to do to engage a larger audience?” We share our ideas.

Lyssa then asks us “Why are we doing this?” We share that we have experienced issues at work and we would like other teams to not go through the same failures”.

Going through these line of questioning and discussions we come to the conclusion that we are doing this workshop to bring “Joy to Teams”. Lyssa asks us to pen this in large letters on a flip chart and then put it up when we deliver the workshop, and suggested we look at the flip chart whenever we feel nervous while we deliver the workshop. We did that. The workshop was a huge success.

What did Lyssa do? She observed us, observed the environment and asked us powerful questions. Powerful questions start with a “what”, “why”, “how”. They cannot be answered with a yes or no. This prompted us to come up with our own answers.  The coach is a neutral party and guides the coaches towards their own answer.

What can you add about the four hats of a Scrum Master? Share your comments and feedback.

References:

  1. Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins
  2. Co-active coaching by Hnery Kimsey-House, Karen Kimsey-House, Philip Sandahl, etc.
  3. Skilled Facilitator – Roger Schwarz
  4. Facilitator's guide to participatory decision making – Sam Kaner

 

About the Author

Anil Jaising is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified DevOps Institute Trainer and a Certified Training from the BACK of the Room – Virtual Edition Trainer.  Anil teaches Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Advanced Scrum Master (A-CSM) workshops from Scrum Alliance  He also teaches Training from the BACK of the Room  In Room and Virtual Edition). He is also the chief product owner of a telemetry plugin At A Glance on Atlassian Jira.

 

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by Anil Jaising

Certified Scrum Master
So what changed in the new Scrum Guide 2020?

The new Scrum Guide arrived yesterday and I was one of the many that joined Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber's virtual event to learn more. Some key changes that I thought are important

  1. Introduction of the product goal

  2. Emphasis on one team instead of a development team within a scrum team

  3. More inclusive language for usage of Scrum beyond Software

  4. A strong alignment of artifacts to product goal, sprint goal and Definition of Done

 

Has Scrum Changed?

There is no fundamental change to Scrum, the new scrum guide is fewer pages, less prescriptive and more inclusive to products beyond software. So let's delve deeper in some of the key changes

  • Introduction of the product goal: I always get asked in my Certified Scrum Master class, “I understand the scrum framework but where do we start? How do we build the product backlog?” The product goal represents a future state of the product and the product backlog emerges to realize the product goal. This is a key starting point because organizations have vision/mission statements, a product goal is part of the organization's vision and serves as a north star for the product

 

  • Emphasis on one team instead of a development team within a scrum team: The scrum team consists of one Scrum Master, One Product Owner and Developers (not no development team). A cohesive unit of professionals focused on the product goal. The total scrum is 10 or fewer people. By changing the development team to developers, the authors took away the concept of a sub-team within a team. The word “developers” could be used in context of developing hardware, a vaccine or a car and goes beyond a software product. This change is probably the biggest one that make the new scrum guide less prescriptive at many different levels.

 

  • Inclusive language to indicate that Scrum goes beyond software products: Several new ideas such as removing the word “release” and making explicit that the sprint review is not a considered a gate to releasing value. Increments can be delivered at anytime, several times to the stakeholder during the sprint. I especially love the statement that there are various practices to forecast progress, burn-downs, burn-ups or cumulative flows. None of these replace the importance of empiricism.

 

  • A strong alignment of artifacts to product goal, sprint goal and Definition of Done: Tying the product backlog as a means to achieve the product goal, the sprint backlog as a means to achieve the sprint goal and finally the idea that work cannot be considered part of the increment unless it meets the definition of done. In my experience several teams fail in scrum due to not having a product goal or clearly understanding or having a sprint goal or definition of done. I believe this strong alignment will bring a lot of clarity to ensure that these commitments are created and inspected and adapted at regular intervals.

 

Less prescriptive changes:

  1. Eliminating the suggested three questions in Daily Scrum and more focused verbiage to increase cross collaboration

  2. Keeping the language simple around sprint cancellations

  3. Less specific on how many actionable improvements should be addressed as soon as possible coming out of a sprint retrospective

 

All in All

I really love the new Scrum Guide in its definition of Scrum as a lightweight framework to help generate value. As we dig deeper in this version, I am sure I will find more gems that I can share and enhance this write up. But if I had to pick on thing that emerged for me, it is “Adopting Scrum is not the goal, generating value is the goal”

 

Valerio and I will be talking about this in a live event on December 2nd at 3 pm EST. Register here to join our live zoom webinar

 
 
 
 
 

You can also download an audio copy from Michael Vizdo's site at http://scrumguide.mvizdos.com/

by Anil Jaising

Certified Scrum Master
How to get PDU credits for your Concepts & Beyond Workshop?

This is one of our most frequently asked question from our students so I wanted to share how would you go about getting these credits from the PMI institute.

 

First of all: Concepts & Beyond is currently not a PMI education provider. To claim your PDUs you will need to go through PMI's continuous certification system

 

By investing your time to discover and go over the Scrum Framework in our Certified Scrum Master or Certified Product Owner workshops, you have earned these 14 PDUs in PMI and these 14 hours also count towards the 21 contact hours you need to qualify for the PMI-ACP test.

 

Follow the below steps

  1. Login into PMI site

  2. Choose “Course or Training” as the PDU category under the “Report PDU's” section

  3. You will be prompted to enter the Provider name and then course. Note: PMI will present you with a list of possible choices. Ignore those and do the following: Provider: Enter Concepts and Beyond, Press done. Course: Enter Certified Scrum Master or Certified Product Owner. Press Done.

  4. Depending on the course you took please use the PMI Talent Triangle (TM) competency categories below

 

Certified Scrum Master

4 PDUs in Leadership

10 PDUs in Technical Project Management

 

Certified Product Owner

4 PDUs in Leadership

8 PDUs in Technical Project Management

2 PDUs in strategic and business management

 

Visit PMI for more information at ccrs.PMI.org or to call PMI Customer Support at +1 610 915 CARE (2273) or contact PMI via email at customercare@pmi.org

 

Concepts & Beyond Inc. is one of the top training companies that focuses in delivering innovative and engaging workshops where learners discover the learning while engaging with each other. Instead of using slides and boring lectures, we use brain science to design our training to ensure the learning is retained in the long term memory of the learners.

by Anil Jaising

Certified Scrum Master  ·  Virtual Training
5 unique insights from our Virtual Beyond User Stories Workshop

Learners in our Certified Scrum Master and Certified Product Owners always mention that they need a deeper dive into user stories, estimation and planning. How can they provide a date to their organization while keeping true to inspecting and adapting the plan? How can they write and split user stories so that an effective minimum viable product can be created? So we designed a 8 hour 2 day half days course that has the following 5 learning outcomes

  • Develop user personas and identify user proxies where needed

  • Apply effective user stories to product management, development and testing

  • Demonstrate how to split stories to adhere to the INVEST model using 12 different techniques

  • Apply relative estimation techniques to estimate risk, complexity and effort for each user story

  • Plan your sprints and releases based on your user story map

Feedback from our students in our pilot class on Oct 19th gave us deep insights into instructional design for our virtual. Five really stood out

 

1. The interactions drove home the concepts and learning

No slides, no screen sharing, so how do we add to what the learner's know. A trainer naturally assumes that everyone joining a class is a novice in the topics of the class. Typically a class has a mixed level of knowledge. Using a mix of activities like matching words and images, filling in a sheet with available choices , evaluating powerful questions that a group can analyze and discuss, filling in a jigsaw puzzle, etc. This enables a group to be focused on an activity that they can discover new learning together, learn and teach each other. Teaching others is the best way to learn. Enabling our learners to have those discussions and stepping back as a trainer to observe, facilitate and guide as needed helped us deliver new concepts.

 

2. Collection of user stories and acceptance criteria formats

We started with an example video streaming product, created a collection of user stories and then built an example product backlog with each story having a wide variety of acceptance criteria. The learners had an opportunity in the workshop to explore our user stories. In practicing to write their own user stories, the learners form groups and add features to the existing products and write stories for those features. The rich set of acceptance criteria helps them add a whole suite of new user stories to support those features. By sharing acceptance criteria formats that will help them with scripting their automated tests was powerful. The idea that user stories can drive scripting automated tests which can be converted to actual working tests even without having to write a single line of code using a technique called Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD)

 

3. Guidance on splitting stories

We used 16 different user story splitting techniques that the learners discover and adopt to split their own stories. The module on splitting is really powerful, where it starts to dawn how they can now start create a vertical slice of the product that they can release without all the bells and whistles and continue to add a few every sprint to increase their release frequency

 

4. Priming and delivering the workshop into two half days

We used 16 different user story splitting techniques that the learners discover and adopt to split their own stories. The module on splitting is really powerful, where it starts to dawn how they can now start create a vertical slice of the product that they can release without all the bells and whistles and continue to add a few every sprint to increase their release frequency

 

5. Use of highly interactive online tools

We have been experimenting with several virtual collaboration tools and for this workshop we choose Mural for whiteboard collaboration, Zoom for polling and of course video conferencing and finally Socrative for quizzes to confirm knowledge. These tools along with Zoom Breakout rooms give us an opportunity to recreate how we would deliver a class in person where learners are encouraged to work and talk with each other at all times and the instructor becomes a guide on the side instead of a sage in the front

 

If you are interested in one of our Advanced User Stories workshop, reach out

by Anil Jaising

Certified Scrum Master  ·  Our stories
Obey the principles without being bound by them

If I interpret Bruce Lee's quote “Obey the principles without being bound by them” from my learning in scrum, I would quote “Be true to scrum values while continuing to inspect and adapt”

 

Commitment is a scrum value and in my last CSM (Certified Scrum Master class) 27 participants joined from 9 countries. I invited our participants to draw an image of what comes to mind when you hear the word “commitment”. The result was mind blowing. I saw an array of “masterpiece” drawings – Wedding rings, holding hands, parents with children, sports teams and more. Before I could “share” what commitment means for a scrum team, they had already figured it out. We are visual in our thinking and images have a powerful effect on learning where any amount of written or spoken words cannot compare. Everyone has heard the quote “An image is worth a 1000 words”. Brain science proves this and once participants visualize scrum values it is a super power they add to their long term memory and use it to help their scrum teams continuously improve.

 

“Super Power” huh! what does that mean? How can Scrum Values be a super power?

 

In 2006 I was aware of Agile mostly in terms of engineering practices made famous by Extreme programming XP, I had never heard of Scrum or XP values, neither had I heard of the scrummaster role. I was a development manager leading a client on-boarding product in Merrill Lynch in New York. The product was being delivered using traditional waterfall and roles. About six months before I joined the Managing Director running technical teams had promised business stakeholders that this new product would be innovative, replace the current system and will be delivered in 3 months! By the time I joined there was no trust between business stakeholders and technology leadership, Development team was working around 16 hours a day and architecture and design were being discussed without a single line of code written.

 

As a leader I initiated a few changes almost immediately, we agreed with stakeholders that we will deliver a monthly “release” available for them to test and make a decision to make it available to their users. Some of the initial months we will deliver alpha and beta releases for them to provide feedback and further direction. There will be full “openness” and collaboration between all groups. The development team rallied around this common goal which they had agreed to before I proposed the change. The goal helped everyone to “focus” on the monthly delivery. Any and all impediments, delays and feedback were communicated with “courage” by all. Due to complete “openness” and “courage”, trust, empathy and “respect” grew. “Commitment” grew, everyone started backing each other and everyone was committed to the team's goal. The stakeholders become patient with issues they found, the development team had the autonomy on how to build and no one told them how long they need to work in a day. The development team thrived and so did the product which eventually was “released” several times with great quality and value for our customers.

Once I learnt Scrum, it connected me with my past experience. Scrum values apply to everyone in the organization including leadership as well as stakeholders and the scrum team.

 

As a scrummaster, one way you can use this super power…

In a retrospective use large post-its with each of the 5 scrum values, ask the scrum team to share with post-its under each value where a value was upheld in the current sprint and where a value was violated? After the data is gathered, ask powerful questions why they think the value was upheld or violated. Discuss with every member contributing and collaborating. The team insights will guide everyone how to improve and support each other.

 

Can you share a story where Scrum values helped you help your team as a scrummaster?

 

For this and other stories join us in our next Certified Scrum Master and Certified Product Owner Class.

Please see our upcoming training events

Use code “CNB” for a $100 discount

by Anil Jaising

Certified Scrum Master
Don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do

Very few people know what they really want to do in life. Once you do “don't give up”!

On May 13th, 2020, I was honored and privileged to become a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) with the Scrum Alliance and join an amazing community of professional trainers and great human beings. About 10 years ago I attended my Certified Scrum Master (CSM). I was spellbound by the instructor on how flawlessly he delivered the class. That's

when my mind was made up, I want to be like him. I started working on my advanced certifications and teaching frequently. It was only in the summer of 2016 that I was introduced to Dave Prior.

Dave, what can I say? I still have a Skype recording that I hold dear to my heart in which you shared your “tough love” as you reviewed my training materials and my personal statement :-). I still remember that discussion. It made me strive higher and work harder. Thank you! It took me a year to get my materials in shape before I started my co-training journey with you.

Bernie Maloney who I first met at the Global Gathering in Minneapolis, Thank you so much for being a mentor, friend, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) coach. I still enjoy your checking on me via text messages 🙂 You and Laura opened your house and heart to me. I cannot thank you enough.

Jason Tanner, you reinforced Training from the BACK of the Room (TBR) principles as we co-created our co-training workbook. It was an amazing “no slides” co-training that opened up a world of possibilities that I had not explored before. I also like to thank each and every team member from Applied Frameworks that were there to mentor me at every stage.

Eric Tucker, I have no words! You were there for me night or day, even after a long day of training. Co-training with you was an amazing journey that helped me understand what interactive and engaging really meant :-). Thank you so much!

Petri Heiramo, your deep knowledge that you share with your students and me and your kindness and generosity to teach a class for my community and do a special stopover in NYC 🙂 Thank you!

Rick Waters, I still remember our class in Jersey City where we co-delivered a class and paid a portion of the proceeds to the American Cancer Society. Thank you for being a friend and mentor. Your generosity certainly rubbed off on me 🙂

Chris Li, Valerio Zanini and Bonsy Yelsangi you spent countless hours to help me this last year to grow from a “not yet” to “approved” Thank you so much!

Jesse Fewell, Kim Brainard, Carlton Nettleton, Kert Petersen, Andreas Schliep, Lisa Reeder, and many more who were always ready to help and mentor. You were amazing all during my journey.

Bjorn, Anu, Judy, and Erika, and of course Lisa, thank you so much for an amazing TAC experience and Howard Sublett for checking on me both when I was a “not yet” and when I was “approved”. Bjorn, ATC, and the 7Cs are now part of me. Thank you!

The CST-Candidate cohort from all over the world, you know who you are 🙂 Thank you for the countless hours you spent in helping me.

Finally, I wanted to thank my family, friends, and students, my wife Kriti, my kids, Mohan, Linda, and many more that supported and lifted me up whenever I was going through a low.

Quoting Bernie “You getting there is inevitable, Just don't give up!” and so my journey continues.

by Anil Jaising