Day 26 – Auxano Sprint 4 & Scrum Mastering
Today is the first day of my week as a the project Auxano Scrum master. I’ve been waiting for this opportunity to see how I perform in the role pretty much since day 1. I started the day off by cleaning and organizing the books and various office supplies on the filing cabinets in the boot camp room, and then moving some of our charts and lists around so that people can view them more easily. I relocated our burn down charts up above the white board, and grouped our scrum-related lists together on the wall above the filing cabinets so everyone can see our working agreements, definition of done, and various story/task techniques from anywhere in the room.
Scrum: Friday we did our third sprint review and retrospective, this weekend I caught up on sleep and watched a bunch of netflix… today we’re starting sprint 4 with a bunch of planning. I’m serving as scrum master this week and looking forward to it! No blocks.
Carrying over from last week, I checked to make sure all of our tasks from previous sprints were filed away in the sprint folders I made a month ago, and then set up the scrum board for this week’s sprint (4).
We started the day off by refactoring code and reorganizing classes and tests into folders. After lunch, we had our two hour planning session and then everyone got to work on the task they wanted to tackle.
For the first time in our boot camp, we put “Hour Estimates” on each task on the scrum board (how we’re supposed to). I asked the guys to write their name on the tasks they worked on so we could direct questions to those who worked on a specific task, and also to make a note of the date any new task was added to the board to aid me in record keeping. Tasks are organized by category/story and priority – top to bottom and left to right. Following up on what Gary McCants mentioned to use on friday, I asked Jef to explain again how we can use the scrum board to help us outline and introduce what we’re reviewing for a sprint in the product demo(review). I think the way we organized it will help improve our review this week.
I made an effort to keep our conversations and tasks time boxed and focused. I also made note to ask if I could help anyone clear some blocks after the group was quiet for 20-30 minutes in the afternoon, and that inquiry ignited conversations that got some things in-progress and hopefully picked away at member blocks (hard to tell, but at least I got them talking). There were some adjustments to our earlier time estimates by the end of the day, and that was expected. I hope to continue to help with clearing blocks every hour or so this week when I notice people sticking to one thing for a long time without group interaction or obvious progress.
I put a motion in front of the group to replace our current Git object with what I came up with this weekend (mentioned in my previous blog). We’ll be using a new object that we can modify more freely and write on and other fun stuff. I have plans for this! 🙂
I stayed at work for about 11.5 hours today because I was working on UI stuff, and I absolutely love that sort of work. It was hard to rip myself away from the computer, but I eventually kicked myself out of the office at 7:30pm. Blog was typed up and published by 10:45pm. Today was pretty much perfect – I wish every day could be this good. I had three delicious meals, and felt successful in my role as scrum master (also knocked out a task today).
Wish me luck this week!
Notes:
Url.Actions
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/989005/make-an-html-actionlink-around-an-image-in-asp-net-mvc
TopBar | Foundation
http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/components/topbar.html
-R