We started a conversation in our last blog post about helping make Agile and Scrum relatable to Organizations and Team Members who may be unfamiliar with the concepts.
We find the easiest way to simply explain Scrum is to use analogies that fit into everyone’s everyday knowledge. Shopping, biking, dining, cooking – who knew they were Scrum?
This is Part Two to the real-life analogies that also demonstrate that you need to BE Agile, not only DO Agile.
Horizontal versus Vertical Slicing
Having your cake and Edith too!
Are your Teams doing requirements stories, development stories, and then testing ones? This is mini-waterfall within a sprint.
It’s your birthday! We got a multi-layered rainbow cake for you topped with delicious icing!
How do you eat your cake? Do you separate out each layer horizontally? No. You cut a slice vertically to get all the layers from top to bottom. This is how the Team should be organizing their work. Vertical slicing helps deliver working software at the end of each sprint. That includes development, unit testing, regression testing, documentation, and so on.
The Solution: Ensure that all the work is structured so that the piece cut from a large feature includes all efforts needed to release the development. Vertical Slicing allows delivery of a working Product and therefore, business value.
Let the team determine “How”
How Shiny Are Your Shoes?
Imagine you’re walking through an airport or a train station. You look at your shoes and decide they could use a shine. So, you stop at a shoe stand and have your shoes shined. Do you count how many left strokes the shoe shiner performs? Right strokes? Or whether he uses a cloth to polish your shoes or a brush? Or in what order he uses them?
No, of course not. All you care about is that the shoes are shiny when he’s done. He’s more likely to do a great job if left alone to do it. He is the expert, so trust him and do not dictate the how.
The Solution: Do not dictate to the Dev Team how they do their work. Collaborate with them and trust them to deliver a finished work at the end of the Sprint.
Right-size your teams for maximum productivity
Too many cooks in the kitchen
Imagine a galley kitchen with too many cooks. They’d be stepping on each others’ toes before long. Amid the ensuing chaos, food orders will be mixed up, communication will suffer, and the quality of the food will too.
On the other hand, having too few cooks will lead to longer delivery times and unsatisfied customers.
Right-sizing Scrum Teams should land you at a sweet spot. Most of the time, the problem is that there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Fix that for a smooth, sustainable pace of delivery.
The Solution: Create a cross-functional Team that is right-sized with all the skill sets necessary to complete user stories to the meaning of Done. An ideal Team has members that can fill in for one another—their skill sets are ambidextrous or T-shaped.
