Pearls For Improving Operational Efficiency

This was a presentation held at one of my previous employers Sprint Reviews after attending a Clarus Professional Scrum Master course.

Transcript

1. Pearls For Improving Operational Efficiency
2. We are going to be introducing a social contract that deals with the relationships between each team member, and between the team and the organisation.
3. Scrum doesn't solve all your problems. It just makes them visible.
4. Collocation • Research has shown that only 7% of communication is the content of the message • The rest is body language, voice tone, context
5. How often distributed team members communicate.
6. The effects of task switching
7. Most productive team size based on extensive research and study. 6+-3 Paths of communication = n(n-1)/2 6 member team = 15 paths. 7 member team = 21 paths. 5 member team = 10 paths.
8. Technical debt • Comes from work that is not really "Done" • Has to be paid at some point, unless your plan includes bankruptcy • Hidden, undone work accumulates
9. Forms of Technical Debt • Defects • Lack of automated build • High code complexity • Lack of automated deployment • Lack of unit tests • Highly coupled code • Business Logic in the wrong places • Too few acceptance tests • High cyclomatic complexity • Duplicated code or modules • Unreadable / hard to read names or algorithms
10. Technical Debt is a Crisis in our Profession • Customers or Stake holders believe they can demand something and it can be done • Developers willingly or unconscionably cut quality to support the belief • Results includeDevelopers and customers resent the profession,Failing products, failing companies, and hateful work.We are there now
11. How did we get here? • It takes 3-10 years for an organisation to back itself into this corner • Once in this corner, your competition can develop & deliver new functionality much faster than you • For every $ of competitive advantage gained by cutting quality, it costs $4 to restore it • Software is an organizational asset and decisions to cut quality must be made by executive management and reflected in the financial statements
12. Paying back technical debt 1.Stop creating debt 2.Make a small payment each and every Sprint
13. Team must solve their own problems • It’s the SM’s job to enable the team to do this. • Not to solve the problems for them. • (self managing)
14. What is the Sprint Review for? • This is the stake holders opportunity to provide input into what they see the most important work items are to be worked on next. • A collaborative working session, not just a demonstration.
15. Where we are
16. Where we are going
17. Scrum Roles Demo