The missing ceremony

It’s been a while since I got my act together and posted here – this seems to coincide with the purchase of my android and a preference for posting expletives to twitter.

So I’m about to embark on my third scrum project and I  thought it a good opportunity to reflect on my personal experience on those first two projects. In particular I wanted to briefly rant about what I’ve been calling the missing ceremony of SCRUM.

On my first project I acted as the Scrummaster  - On this project we were just dipping our feet in the water and I enjoyed the experience (..and the project went well). In my second project I entered the project midway and was asked to take on the Product Owner role.  I entered the team during the third Sprint, and my predecessor was still involved so I was lucky enough to act as observer for the first couple of weeks before diving straight in. There was a bit of disturbance in the team in the overlap between Sprint 3 and 4 – I was coming in as Product Owner, our Scrummaster had scheduled leave and as usual I had a boat load of other stuff on the go…anyway we committed to Sprint 4 and away we went. I began to notice that during Sprint 4 the team were having quite a few interpretation issues regarding the stories which we’d committed to. Now I believe there are two ways of looking at this issue:

1. In an ideal situation we can take a story from the backlog and have on hand all the resources and people to discuss what the story is all about, this might be a BA for example who knows the intended feature like this back of their hand and can work directly with the developer and tester to work through the story.

2. In an not so ideal situation we don’t have these resources on hand and we can ensure that we prepare the stories to such a state prior to commitment that we can avoid the unnecessary interpretation chatter.

The first approach is a well oiled machine, it takes time to mature to a scrum like this IMO. The second approach is where I directed my attention, the critical ingredients missing were a) the Scrum master to help us implement the process properly (he was away unfortunately) and b) proper preparation of  the backlog prior to the commitment. So I made an appointment with the client to do a ‘formal review’ of the backlog near the end of Sprint 4. This is essentially the missing ceremony  – its backlog grooming  - if you haven’t heard Roman Pichler speak about Agile product management then I recommend listening to this. I call it the missing ceremony because to me it seems such a crucial aspect of sprint preparation that I would now always consider making it a mandatory activity. The net result of the backlog grooming was that I had already spent time quizzing the client about the backlog before Sprint planning and I was confident that I understood the stories and that I had already covered off many of the questions that the team would ask. This meant that less questions and queries arose during planning  (which makes estimation easier), less questions were raised at the sprint kick off and most importantly less interpretation issues came up during the sprint.

Even if you do have a well oiled Scrum I still think there’s value in preparing the backlog ahead of sprint planning and I would go as far as making this a standing part of your Sprint.