When in Doubt...Act It Out

I was recently working with a team on planning their first sprint on a new project. After a couple of very confusing hours talking about what the project even was about, I asked the team to create personas for their users on large sheets on the wall to help them visualize it, thinking it would help them break through the confusion. But, it didn't really work which really let me know how bad the problem was.
So, it was time to improvise...I had each of them take one of the user roles and write it on a post-it, then stick it to themselves. Then we just acted out the system functions with each person taking on one of the user roles and describing how they would use a feature and how they would be interacting with another user. It worked, it was fun, and it helped everyone get a clear view of the features and the user interactions.

Learn something new everyday! I will certainly be using this technique again. Give it a try.

What's Your Circuit Breaker?

I was working with a group this week and we were in a discussion about making sure that their Scrum teams do the proper level of capacity planning for each sprint in order to avoid overloading. We took a break and I was looking at a home grown power distribution system in the room where two strings of 3-4 power strips each were connected in parallel to two outlets in the floor. No surprise, seen that before. But it got me thinking of yet another metaphor...

Each of the outlet strips has a circuit breaker on it, and the building has breakers for the circuits running through the building. Below is a excerpt from howstuffworks.com explaining circuit breakers:


The circuit breaker is an absolutely essential device in the modern world, and one of the most important safety mechanisms in your home. Whenever electrical wiring in a building has too much current flowing through it, these simple machines cut the power until somebody can fix the problem. Without circuit breakers (or the alternative, fuses), household electricity would be impractical because of the potential for fires and other mayhem resulting from simple wiring problems and equipment failures.


Harris, Tom.  "How Circuit Breakers Work."  09 May 2002.  HowStuffWorks.com.   

Fires and Mayhem! Yikes! Sounds like a few of the projects I've seen in my career. So I thought it would be a good topic after the break to point out what happens when we run too much current through a wire with a certain capacity (no, I did not light the place up!)...a good chance of fire and mayhem. Circuit breakers establish the parameters that allow power to effectively and efficiently flow through the system. When the limits are hit, the breaker shuts down the whole circuit until action is taken to bring it back within limits.

Establishing the teams capacity and the "focused task time" keep the team safe and allow them to increase their speed with experience and learning. When overloaded they often wind up in fire and mayhem. 

What are your team's circuit breakers for the sprint? How do you establish the parameters? What signals your breakers to trip? Who has to take action to reduce the load if they do trip? Do you have surge protection? 

Zero Point User Stories

Recently, with a few clients, I have suggested that they put user stories in their backlogs with zero points. These stories identify work that is being done, but does not add value for the end user. People have used zero point stories in the past to identify some unit of work that was very small. But I'm seeing another angle...

I'm doing this is because if we look at the points that we typically put on a story, we primarily are doing it to identify the relative size. However, I have seen a lot of stories for things like defect fixing (when the team has not conquered the zero defect concept yet), or supporting an audit for ISO or CMMI. By having the stories in the backlog, we make sure the work is visible, by giving it zero points we make sure that that work is not showing as "value points for an end-user".

Before trying this, I was having teams reserve hours in their capacity for things like this and that worked fine. This just makes it a little easier and stops us from counting non-value add work in velocity. Seems to be working great! Give it a try...