Not that it should be all about money, but it’s an easy way to ask the question… Have you ever asked yourself,
I wish I could get paid to –
and then you end that sentence with a verb, or two, or ten?
You already know the answer.
What is it?
Month: January 2014
Halve It Your Way or A Shovelful of Sugar
Eating your own dog food, or dogfooding, is like the practice of practicing what you preach, which can feel like having to taste your own medicine when the medicine ain’t so tasty, or if it isn’t Gmail.
Want to piss off a software developer? Tell her she’s got less time to code something. This isn’t specific to coders, of course, but this is more the realm I work in, so I can speak to it. She’ll thrash. “Leave me be,” she’ll say. “You foul beast,” she’ll add. (“And stop speaking for me,” I’ll type on her behalf, parenthetically.)
Being told there’s less time to do stuff sucks. The Scrum response to this is to, well, do less stuff.
Folks, I am opening up a can of whoop-ass my own Scrumalicious dog food and halving my Sprints from a time box of two weeks to one week, which means I will proportionately plan to do fewer points worth of things per now-shorter Sprint. “You damn dirty ape,” I say through clenched teeth, “Why?”
I’ll tell me why.
Last Sprint felt a little too eventful, and I was able to track this using my latest Kaizen Story, which was
…to monitor which stories get implemented that are emergent and not related to my Sprint Goal.
In doing so, I monitored myself diving deep into emergent stories related to Bitcoin (invested in 1 BTC), Litecoin (invested in 10 LTC), and AirBnB (opened up our home to strangers). Were they things that ultimately help me out? The Product Owner in me thinks so, but they didn’t further me along the journey of accomplishing my Sprint Goal or getting done my reduced number of Sprint stories. To top it all off, I have yet to do the Retrospective, but I attribute that to getting food poisoning right at the very end of the Sprint.
I feel like I’ve fallen off the bandwagon.
Or have I?
Having relatively short time boxes neatly punctuates what can otherwise be an endless slog of personal development, in the ScrumOfOne realm, or software development, in the just-about-everywhere-else realm. It provides a point of transparency that you can then inspect, from which a specific practice of adaptation hopefully emerges. What I could clearly see was that the points associated with the emergent stories were greater than my predetermined buffer. This triggered a rather Scrumalicious adaptation which, aaugh, increases my chances of getting my Sprint Backlog (predetermined list of things to do) completed if I shorten that list and then shorten the time I next check in… with… myself.
It feels like punishment, which I’m imposing on myself, which is twisted; however, it is a practice designed to get the team to win. For good measure, I’m throwing in a period of grooming my own fur Product Backlog.
Naked
I have a co-worker, who, anytime he is about to reproduce a software defect, says,
Notice how my hands never leave my arms.
This is his version of, “Notice, there is nothing hiding up my sleeves,” before a magic trick. It’s cute. He also tells jokes like,
What does Cape Cod and an elephant have in common?
Hyannis.
But you’re not here for classy jokes (tee hee). You’re here because the title caught your eye, and now you’re beginning to wonder if you’ve been dup’d into reading asinine humor (tee).
The underlying theme in seriously restarting my own ScrumOfOne is transparency, first with myself, then with all you adoring fans. I shared how I’ve been setting myself up with Sprint Backlogs, placing value in completing them, and then my thought processes to Scrumily address this short-term personal development objective after corresponding Retrospectives. In line with this transparency, I have added a top-level page to share how I plan to grow ScrumOfOne as a website, a blog, and as a meme.
Scrum co-founder Jeff Sutherland said he hadn’t heard of applying Scrum to personal development, so I’m taking this journey seriously, stewarding into maturity a relatively nascent idea (hee).
Tornadee
Thinking back, the concept was a little trippy. There was this cartoon about a couple of tornadoes: a mama tornado and a baby tornado. The baby tornado is a little messy, yet definitely not as destructive as the mama tornado, and some cartoon character isn’t so appreciative of the little one’s Midas touch, so he tries to capture and put an end to the baby tornado. Luckily, the mama tornado swoops in at the nick of time and ‘saves the day’. My brother and I would call that baby tornado a “tornadee”. (The actual cartoon differs slightly from my recollection.)
When a team is created, there is a usual progression of development that moves from forming, to storming, to norming, and finally to performing.
Regarding my ScrumOfOne team… of one… I’ve already formed. (I’ve met myself. I’ve shaken my own hand. I did the trust fall exercise. It was embarrassing.) Before I get to performing, where I’m reliably completing ScrumOfOne stories with a sustainable and improving velocity, which is after I get to norming, where I’m completing ScrumOfOne stories with some consistency and smoothness in ‘working mode’ (living mode?), I would have to get through storming. This is where the different aspects and members of #TeamMerrill are still figuring out how to play well with one another, so beyond sounding schizophrenic, it can look a little messy.
Thus, lately, I’ve been a tornadee. (It’s a stretch, I know.)
Standard Scrum practice says to get through three Sprints before determining an average velocity one can work with, particularly for planning scope per release. Until velocity stabilizes (things are smooth), I think it’s fair to say the team is storming (things are rocky); a low-varying velocity is indicative of a well-oiled machine of a team.
As I enter Sprint #3 of restarting ScrumOfOne (Sprint 143), man am I seeing how I am not yet sustainably developing. And this is fine. I’ll get there. Sprint 142 had a velocity of 45 points, which is more than Sprint 141’s 37 points, but I’m still not getting all of my committed Sprint Backlog complete, which means a lot of my story points are coming from emergent stories. This is something I’ve been blogging about for the past two posts, which, besides being a fun brain dump, is most likely a subconscious suggestion to do something about it.
The Kaizen Story for Sprint 143 is thus to monitor which stories get implemented that are emergent and not related to my Sprint Goal. I’m setting up a relevant buffer of 13 points, which is about a third of my Sprint Backlog. This should help me get to norming then performing. I’m kinda doing being a tornadee. It’s 2014 already.