The Art of Scrum How Scrum Masters Bind Dev Teams and Unleash Agility

222 Pages·2016·10.21 MB·English

CA Press
The Art of
Scrum
How Scrum Masters Bind Dev Teams
and Unleash Agility
Dave McKenna
THE ART OF SCRUM
HOW SCRUM MASTERS BIND DEV TEAMS
AND UNLEASH AGILITY
Dave McKenna
Th e Art of Scrum: How Scrum Masters Bind Dev Teams and Unleash Agility
Dave McKenna
CA Technologies, Aliquippa, Pennsylvania,
USA
ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-2276-8 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-2277-5
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4842-2277-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958011
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Managing Director: Welmoed Spahr
Acquisitions Editor: Robert Hutchinson
Developmental Editor: James Markham
Technical Reviewer: Elaine Ritchie
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Printed on acid-free paper
To my Father, who passed from this life to the next
while I was writing this book. Dad, I hope that
somehow you know that I finished this book.
Contents
About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii
About the Technical Reviewer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Part I: Scrum: Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter 1: The Agile Principles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3
Chapter 2: The Scrum Framework. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Chapter 3: Scrum Roles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Chapter 4: Scrum Team Structures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Chapter 5: Scrum Ceremonies and Artifacts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Part II: Scrum: The Scrum Master’s Perspective. . . . . . 95
Chapter 6: The Scrum Master’s Responsibilities and Core Functions . . .97
Chapter 7: The Scrum Master’s Interaction with Other Roles . . . . . 133
Part III: The Scrum Master’s Skill Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Chapter 8: Sof t Skills of the Scrum Master . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Chapter 9: Technical Skills of the Scrum Master. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Chapter 10: Contingency Skills of the Scrum Master. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Chapter 11: Putting It All Together. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
About the Author
Dave M cKenna i s a certified Scrum Master and
Agile Coach who has worked in the information
technology field for more than twenty years. A
United States Air Force veteran who started his
career in IT unboxing IBM and Apple computers
in a Computerland store, McKenna eventually
became a Novell Certified Network Engineer
and worked his way into a Sustaining Engineer
position at CA Technologies. In 2009 he began
his Scrum Master journey, which continues today.
About the Technical
Reviewer
Elaine R itchie is an Agile Coach and SAFe Program Consultant at CA
Technologies with over 30 years of experience in software development. With
a degree in Computer Science and a background in software engineering,
management, product ownership, and project management, Elaine held almost
every role in Scrum before becoming a Scrum Master and Agile Coach.
Since 2013 she has been leading CA’s Mainframe division through Agile
Transformation through coaching, teaching, and facilitation.
Elaine is a Certified Scrum Master (CSM), an ICAgile Certified Professional in
Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC), and a SAFe Program Consultant (SPC4).
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank my family for their unwavering support through the writing of
this book. When it got tough (and it did), it was you guys that kept me going.
Thank you to my fellow Agile coaches Elaine Ritchie and Jay Cohen. When
you read this book, it’s going to sound more like Elaine and Jay talking than me.
That’s because they constantly have poured into me during my Agile journey.
Without them, this book would not have happened.
Thank you to Bob Carpenter for believing in me. It was Bob who encouraged
me to become a Scrum Master and later a coach. I owe my career to him.
Thank you to Jake Turner and Tony Pharr. Jake showed me what an impact a
coach could make on somebody’s life, and Tony showed me how a champion
goes about his business.
Thank you to all the teams I’ve worked with in my career. This book is for you
all. All of the high points and low points of our combined experiences have
woven a beautiful tapestry that I have tried to describe in these pages.
Thank you to the editors Rita Fernando, Robert Hutchinson, and James
Markham. I’m sure my unique writing style presented some challenges. I
appreciate all of your hard work.
Last, I’d like to thank my best friend and wife Rhonda for putting up with me.
Believe me, I don’t know how she does it…
Introduction
It’s December 2006 and I’m sitting on a 5-gallon bucket in front of a Best
Buy store. It’s 2 am and it’s cold—really, really cold. I have my father’s hunt-
ing jacket on, so I look like a 300-pound pile of leaves while I’m sitting there.
Snow starts to fall softly as I look at the other folks who’ve lined up outside
this electronics retailer, and I can’t help but keep asking myself the same thing
over and over again.
“Why am I doing this?”
It’s dark, it’s cold, and I look like I belong on an episode of Duck Dynasty more
than six years before the first episode aired. Why am I spending the night in
front of a multichannel consumer electronics retailer?
Three words: A Nintendo Wii.
It seemed like that Christmas the entire Western Hemisphere wanted one of
those game systems—including my daughters. If there was going to be a big
surprise on the morning of December 25th, I was going to have to hang out
on the sidewalk and hope what I saw on the internet was accurate. This was
before the days of social media. I spent a good deal of my time intently moni-
toring forums and chatrooms. On this day, the word was that this location
would have 15 of the technological marvels… I was willing to do whatever it
took to get one.
I had tried to order it from a number of online retailers, but each one gave
the same response. The Wii would not be shipped until after December 25th.
So there I was, sitting on a bucket, ninth in line. When I showed up around 10
pm there were already eight people there, and by the time the store manager
came out at 1 am, fifteen folks (including yours truly) were lined up. He didn’t
tell us how many Wii’s he would have in the morning. He just said that he did
have them, and they would pass tickets out at 7 am. You would think that
tension would be high for the next six hours. That we would be eyeing each
other like Old West gunslingers. The slightest move in the wrong direction
and all hell would have broken loose. After all, these things were impossible
to get your hands on. This may have been the last chance to get one before
that fat, jolly elf came down the chimney.
But that wasn’t the case. We all sat around and talked about the cool things
we heard the Wii could do. Folks were so amped up that they were positively
giddy about the fact that they were going to get one. Folks were blown away
xiv Introduction
by the fact that you would not be mashing buttons with this new console. It
sensed your movement, and reacted accordingly. It was so innovative that it
was selling rings around its holiday competition, the Sony Playstation 3. In fact,
when I was out hunting a Wii, there was always a stack of PS3s sitting there.
Every time I asked a sales associate if they had any Wii consoles, the answer
was always, “No, but I have Playstations if you want one.”
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason I decided to become a Scrum Master.
This behavior is what we should be looking for from our customers. No,
I don’t want customers camped out on the sidewalk in front of my office
(although I do admit that it would be really cool if it ever did happen…).
What I do want to see is customers who cannot wait for the next release
of our products. Customers who attend our Sprint review meetings and say “I
want that as soon as possible… Can I have it Now?!”.
Customers who are so intimately involved with the Agile development pro-
cess that they can’t help but get excited about what the Scrum teams are
working on. Because they have communicated to product management what
they need to get from the release, and the Scrum team delivered that func-
tionality while getting constant feedback from them.
A small man, who looks a bit like Danny DeVito, is trying to convince a skep-
tical room full of developers and management types that this thing called
“Agile” will work at our company. I really did not see how this was going to
work. He was talking about increasing customer interaction, which I was all
for. Working as a sustaining engineer, I was frustrated with what we were
putting in our products. In fact, I had just sat in a meeting where a customer
took our development manager to task for not getting their enhancements
into the product. The customer wasn’t upset because it was taking too long
to get what they asked for—they were upset because none of the stuff they
had asked for was planned to be in any future release. They felt ignored and
were threatening to go to a competitor’s product.
The one thing that really hit home about this Agile stuff that was being pre-
sented was the fact that the customer was really the focus… of everything.
Development would be done on “Scrum teams,” which were self-organized,
cross-functional teams that are hyper-focused on delivering customer value. In
order to do this, the command-and-control structure that was in place would
have to change. New Agile roles would need to be created. One that grabbed
my interest was a role called “Scrum Master.”
As it was explained to us way back then by that wild little guy, the job of Scrum
Master could have a big impact on costs, saving the company money —period.
The role was a full-time position. A Scrum Master is the servant-leader of
the Scrum team. At the risk of being overly simplistic, the Scrum Master is
responsible for the Agile process, doing whatever it takes to ensure that the
team embraces Agile and is constantly improving.