My scrum workflow

I recently became a task lead at my company. While I’m thrilled at the opportunity, I also am terrified.

I want my teammates to be succeed. I want to also not trap them in meetings, I think we would all appreciate having more time to do technical things. Most importantly, I want the team to never loose sight of the end goal, generating business value. That’s why we get paid the big bucks.

Sprints

• Looser sort of scrum
  • “Kanban with deadlines”
• No story points
  • I find story points are not a great way to really measure “complexity”
    • Software is complex, and we are not great at measuring said complexity!
  • Creates the wrong incentives in terms of works — I’d rather prioritize devs working at their own pace
  • It’s on me, the TL, to make sure things are flowing smoothly
• Standup 2x a week
  • Standups are mostly focused on giving updates, making sure the rest of the team is synced, and making sure everyone is unblocked
  • If a blocker comes up, schedule a meeting after with the relevant parties to unblock
• Longer sprints (3-4 weeks) versus shorter sprints
  • Less meetings overall
  • Probably works bc I work in a matrix model company

Retros

1:1

• I like 1:1 meetings.
  • Once a week is too often, before the end of a sprint is a good way to decompress + aid in sprint planning.
• 2-3 days before retro
• Meeting is max 30 minutes long
• First half (15 minutes):
  • “Personal” stuff
  • General check-in, how are you, how are you satisfied, what can I do to support you and your goals
  • Strictly not about the project
• Second half (15 minutes):
  • “What did you work on”
  • “What needs to get done”
• Share notes directly with them after the meeting
  • If you want your colleagues to trust you, then they need to know how you’re interpreting things
  • Gives them the opportunity to make corrections
  • When the retro comes, your notes can help them shape their own notes

Refine scope, asynchronous collaboration

Create tickets, preliminary

• Based on convos with team members, create draft “tickets”
  • I’ll likely do this inside obsidian via obsidian-projects

Meet with PM

• Meet with the PM
• 30 minutes max meeting
• Refine scope, check if everything looks good
• Discuss high-level plans

Post retrospective whiteboard publicly, ask for the creation of notes.

• Each team member must create 5 notes in advance
  • Gentle bump 1 hour before retro if not completed
• Ideally: notes are private to everyone before the retro begins
  • Prevent copying of notes
  • Gets honest feedback and discourages herding
    • Is this possible with our current software
• Color-coded notes, each team member gets their own color

Actually create the tickets inside of Jira

• Potential: automate it based on the Jira API with a python script?

Retrospective and planning

• Maximum ONE hour
• While I like icebreakers, I think they can potentially be a huge time sink while artificially extending the length of the meeting
  • So. Don’t. The goal is for the retrospective to be “fun” outside of the icebreaker.
• Chit-chat, buffer (5 minutes)
  • Inevitably, it will happen
• Retro (30 minutes)
  • Given the pre-filled notes, spend time grouping them into the various categories (5 minutes)
  • Have each team member talk about their notes (5 minutes)
  • Create a list of action items based on the common themes of the notes (5 minutes)
  • Vote on which ones are more important (5 minutes)
  • Check if we accomplished the action items from last retro (5 minutes)
• Sprint Planning (25 minutes)
  • Go over JIRA board, as a group
  • Make slight modifications as needed
  • If more drastic modifications are needed, hold a follow up meeting with the relevant parties