SCRUM MASTER FIRST MONTH

SCRUM MASTER THINGS TO FIND OUT

Find out the various products or projects your team is working on.

Stakeholders

• Find out who your stakeholders are.

• If there are many stakeholders, find out who their representatives are. Who are

  those core people who make decisions concerning the product; who are those

  who bring the projects to the team.

• It is possible to have only one stakeholder per product.

• Make attempts to meet the stakeholder, introduce yourself to them, get to know

  them and request to have a meeting with them if possible. In the meeting,

  • Find out what the expectations are.

  • Find out the challenges they face with the current team.

  • Find out what they think the team could improve on.

  Product Owner

  • Find out who your product owner is.

  • Endeavor to have a meeting with your product owner. In the meeting,

    • Find out what the expectations are.

    • Find out the challenges they face with the current team.

    • Find out what they think the team could improve on.

    • Find out how requirements move from business to the team

    • Find out requirement are refined into product backlog

    • Find out if user stories pass the invest model

    • Find out if they use story mapping

  Development Team

  • Find out the team composition.

    • Who does what?

    • Why do they do what they do?

  • Are there any team members leaving?

  • Are there any new team members coming?

  • Do we have any members assisting more than one team?

● Set up a 1 on 1 meeting with every team member to get to know them. In the meeting,

• Find out if they are happy with the current process. If yes, why? If no, why?

• What they think is sustainable in the team; what they think the team is doing well and should keep doing.

• What challenges do they see in the team?

• Are there any team mates stressing up the team? (In asking this question,

  explain that you come as a neutral person and you are just finding ways to help the team).

• Current development best practices 

  DOCUMENTATION

1. User guide/Manual

Find out if they have one and take a look at it especially if it’s about coding.

1. Definition of Ready -

2. Acceptance criteria -

3. Definition of Done -

4. Current Charter -

   and take a look.

TEAM PROCESSES

1. Current Scrum Process

Find out if they have and take a look.
Find out if they have and take a look.
Find out if they have and take a look.
This is also called team agreement. Find out if they have

Find out the following:

• How they run their ceremonies?

• How often they run them?

• Why they run it the way they do?

• The length of their sprint and why that length?

• They may draw it out. If so take a picture of it.

Development Process

Find out the following:

• Do they do paired programing?

• Do they do code review?

3Deployment Process

Find the steps involved before deploying to production For example

• Development, Testing and production or

• Development, testing, UAT (sometimes called customer testing) and production.

QA Process

Find out the following:

• What happens when the developer is done with the code?

• Do they have automated testing or manual testing?

• Do they have test cases? How do they write their codes?

• Do they track test metrics?

• Do they run unit testing? If not, why? ​Unit testing is about testing input against output e.g. access to account after inputting correct login and password. Making sure the fundamentals are working.

Continuous Integration Process

Find out the following:

• Do they do continuous integration to begin with?

• If not, don’t propose it. They may not have the capacity for it.

  RECOMMENDED ACTIONS TO TAKE

PRODUCT PRIORITIZATION MEETING

In the event your findings reveal that the team works on multiple products, a product prioritization meeting is necessary.

▪ Attendees

• Product owner

•  Stakeholders

• Scrum Master

▪ Meeting Purpose

Prioritize the various products

• Role of Scrum Master

  • Present the team velocity to the stakeholders to explain how much the

    team can do in a sprint.

  • Present the product backlog as well.

• Role of Product Owner
  Based on conversation with stakeholders, prioritizes the products. ✓ Prioritization is done based on how valuable the products are to the

  stakeholders.
  The product owner should also sectionalize the products/projects if they

  are not already sectionalized. This has to do with assigning products to specific stakeholders if there are many stakeholders.

  NOTE: ​You must have a meeting to discuss on the above issues prior to this meeting.

TEAM TRAINING

Don’t refer to this as training, just explain to the team that you want them to agree on some basic agile practices.

▪ Attendees

•  Product owner.

•  Agile coach

•  Scrum master.

• Development team.

  ▪ Purpose

• Train based on what you have observed the team to be lacking in.

• Keep the training around working agreement and intended changes to

  the various scrum ceremonies.

• Touch on topics such as backlog refinement and sprint planning

  • Sprint goal

  • Capacity planning ● velocity

• Show the team we they are, where we are headed and how we will get there. It is important to let them know it will be a gradual process to get there.

• Agree on the length of sprints.

• The main purpose of this meeting is to tidy up the house.

Prior to Training

• Meet with the agile coach

• Present to her your observations and proposed changes.

• Ask for her recommendations:

  • Acknowledge her knowledge of the team and organization.

  • Inquire if the changes you intend to bring has ever been tried in

    the past.

  • If yes find out what the team’s reactions were to those changes.

  • Do you think the team is stable enough to handle these intended

    changes?

  • Is leadership onboard with these changes?

    GENERAL THINGS TO NOTE

1. For a minimum of two weeks all you should do is ask questions.