Scrum Master

"You will be scrum master of this from next week!" These are the words that you hear and then you find yourself in a mess. You really don't know what to do from next week? Your first reaction should be "Will I be a full time scrum master or a part time one?"

Definition of Ready

Dear Scrum Master, Don't let anything that's not READY into your Sprint.

Imagine, you are going to cook a meal for your spouse for your anniversary evening. Before starting to cook, you actually check, whether all the ingredients are available, you check if those are in the sufficient quantities, you buy out the missing things and then you start cooking, Right? The same is true for user stories.
User stories after their birth, have very tiny details. It is difficult for the team to commit to such stories. Team needs discussions, analysis, arguments and negotiations to groom the stories, so that the stories become matured and then team can commit to the stories.
But how does a team know, if the story is really ready to be taken into the sprint?
As user-story becomes clear and team doesn’t have any unanswered question and dependency remaining, the story is considered "READY". The list of items which help us to identify the "READY"ness is called as Definition of Ready (DOR).

Every user story must satisfy the INVEST criteria, before team commits to it. Every dependency

from the story needs to be removed, before team commits to it. All the necessary softwares and hardwares must be ready, before team commits to any story. These and many more items comprise into a list i.e. DOR.
Before committing to any story, the team can check if the story meets all the DOR criterion. If not they can reject the story, so that the stakeholders can put the missing details into it.
Agile promotes "Courage" as its core value. Courage to say "No" is important while committing for the stories. DOR gives us the sensible reasons to say "No".

Affinity Estimation

Ingredients:

Facebook statuses of a scrum master

Day: 23 May 2016

6:00 AM
Did yoga and meditation. This will help me to keep myself calm and composed while tackling every unexpected impediment at today's scrum.

7:00 AM
Had hot cup of ginger tea with a sandwich. Heading for office. Need to reach before my team, so that I can remove any unwanted distractions before my team reaches its desk.

8:00 AM
Called our helpdesk to check Tonny's PC, which was not starting up. Could resolve the impediment within 30 minutes.

9:00 AM
Reminded the Product Owner about adding details to the 3 stories those are on top of the backlog. Those 3 stories are the potential candidates for next sprint.

10:00 AM
Researched on a new Retrospective technique called "sinking ship". We will use it to gather action items in this sprint's retrospective.

11:00 AM
Fought with a project manager who was intruding my scrum team and who was asking the team to prepare reports for leadership meeting, which was outside of our sprint work. Won the battle successfully.

12:00 PM
Had Paneer-Tikka for lunch at "The great India cafe" on 43rd street.

1:00 PM
Held a training session for new developers in our scrum team on TDD. I hope they understood it very well.

2:00 PM
Checked Rally tool to see if everyone has updated the stories with details, hours, TODOs and new tasks. Burndown looks pathetic.

3:00 PM
Enjoyed the backlog grooming session. Stories for next sprint are almost ready. Had to cut down few discussions which were going off track.

4:00 PM
Booked meeting rooms for tomorrow's midsprint review. Booked meeting rooms for Demo and Retrospective meetings. Booking in advance helps to get the room closer to the team location.

5:00 PM
Facilitated daily stand up meeting. Got to know about an impediment in an integration story. Setup meeting with the third party application owner to analyze the problem along with a senior developer from my side.

6:00 PM
Informed in SOS that the integration story in in risk due to dependency on third party application. We should update our Definition of Ready to incorporate the dependencies.

7:00 PM
Enjoying at the Hard Rock cafe with some chickens who want to implement scrum in their teams.

This article briefly tells you the roles and responsibilities of a scrum master.