Day 5: SCRUM, SCRUM, SCRUM, lunch, and high and low context cultures

SCRUM, SCRUM, SCRUM, lunch, high and low context cultures, and... something which really enlightened my day. You'll see :) 

As promised, the building where Axon Active Vietnam is located (10th floor)

Okay, now I will go straight into Scrum (seriously) so you understand how the teams at Axon Active Vietnam work.

As already mentioned yesterday, Scrum is a framework which helps to cope with complex projects.
At Axon Active Vietnam, everything is organised based on Scrum which is why I feel that you should know a little bit about this approach.

The different roles in a Scrum Team: 

source: http://cdn.axonactive.com/wp-content/
uploads/2013/07/Scrum-Card-for-Product-Owner.pdf

1) The Product Owner (PO) could also be described as the customer who has a demand for a certain product. He is responsible for the WHAT. In an optimal case the PO is really the customer and an active part of the team. As a PO you also have to prioritize the different tasks (User Stories).

In Scrum, everything is broken down in to small pieces so people do not lose themselves in unnecessary details. Therefore, the PO writes so called "User Stories". These stories are kept rather simple and are built up as follows:

As a <user role>?  (--> who?)
I want <goal>?      (--> what?)
So that <reason>? (--> why?)

A typical user story could be:

As a student at FHNW
I want to have the possibility to import my personal timetable directly into my calendar
So that I don't have to spend time to copy all entries manually from the excel sheet

This story might already be a little bit too complex as it involves more than one step. So the team would probably not be satisfied with my User Story or would have to break it down in separate stories.

As mentioned, the PO is responsible for prioritizing the different user stories and defines what the result should be like.

source: http://cdn.axonactive.com/wp-content/uploads/
2013/07/Scrum-Card-for-Team-Member.pdf

2) The Implementation Team members play obviously also an important role in Scrum. They are responsible for the HOW. A team consists of 5 to 9 people and is responsible to implement the User Stories. Every morning the teams get together and have a meeting and all the team members explain:

1. What did I do yesterday that helped the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
2. What will I do today to help the Development Team meet the Sprint Goal?
3. Do I see any impediment that prevents me or the Development Team from meeting the Sprint Goal?

The term Sprint refers to the actual working phase during which the different user stories are realized. The team alone decides how many user stories it is able to realize during one Sprint (a Sprint takes 2 weeks).

For those more interested in the comic than in Scrum :) 

As mentioned above, every team decides how many stories it will be able to cover during a Sprint. To make the effort per story somehow tangible, each story receives so called "Story Points". The process of assigning Story Points to the different User Stories sounds awesome. It is a "poker game" (you can also see this in the video I posted yesterday). I really hope I will be able to see this on my own while I am here.
The team has a meeting where they review all the Story Points which came from the PO. Then, for every User Story, every team member estimates how much effort this particular story implies.
Every team member then places the card which has the estimated effort on it in front of him or her faced down, so the other members are not influenced in their decision. When everybody has decided on their estimation, they uncover the cards and compare and discuss the results. If there are huge differences in the estimated effort, it can be an indication that the User Story has not been understood the same way by the members and that a clarification with the PO is necessary. Like this, it can also be avoided that certain requirements are misinterpreted.

These are just some of the poker cards. You can review the total collection under:
http://cdn.axonactive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/PDF-Planning-Poker-for-Print1.pdf

The POs have specified their desired outcomes within a digital backlog. The teams have displayed these backlogs also on their boards. In the following pictures you can see some backlogs of the Sprints. Be aware that this is always one Sprint on each of the boards.

The printed papers on the left are user stories
and the post-its are then tasks to be done related
to the user story. This team is at the very beginning
of a Sprint.

Team "WOW!" is actually quite at the end of a sprint but you can nicely see that on the very left, they have the user stories,
which are then specified into tasks and eventually move on to "in progress" and "done". 

The backlog of team "next"

I am actually pretty excited about this way of project tracking. If you walk by the the different boards you can immediately see if a team is at the beginning or the end of a Sprint and if they seem to be stuck with some particular issue. The Burndown chart (part of every Backlog board) also indicates how the team is on track during their Sprints.

You can see that the team was experiencing some
difficulties in the beginning where the points to be done
actually increased tona higher level than it was at the beginning.
Right know, however, they seem to be on track to finish the Sprint on time. 

The Burndown chart shows the progress in a Sprint. This means, that the Story Points assigned to each story in the first planning meeting (poker game) are added up, and every day, the progress is updated in the Burndown chart and the tasks are moved accordingly over the board. This happens every morning in the daily meeting I have mentioned at the beginning of this section about the Implementation Teams.

Updating the backlog board for the
current Sprint at the daily meeeting

Uptdating the Burndown chart for the
current Sprint at the daily meeting

This leaves us now with the last role of the Scrum team.

source: http://cdn.axonactive.com/wp-content/uploads/
2013/07/Scrum-Card-for-Scrum-Master.pdf

3) The Scrum Master has a very important role! He is as important as every other team member and you should not underestimate his function. The Scrum Master is the trouble shooter and the order keeper. He makes sure that everything works fine and also takes care that the team members are able to do their work and do not get disturbed by external influence factors. He reduces redundancy steps and should be an example to team. His main tasks basically include:

- Responsible for increasing productivity
- Responsible for using scrum framework
- Facilitates and coaches the team
- Owns the impediment Backlog








These are the roles which are immediately involved in the Scrum model applied at Axon Active Vietnam. Additionally, I already mentioned some specific tasks. The following picture shows again a short overview of the different roles:

source: http://cdn.axonactive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Scrum-Card-for-Scrum-Master.pdf

As I have already covered quite some steps of the Scrum organization, the next part should be a little less complicated (at least for me to write it :) ).

Scrum means basically that you break down a big project into smaller parts. Like this, you are able to focus on the different steps in detail and also get the steps done (I guess we all know projects where there seem to be endless meetings but finally nothing happens at all). So the circle you can see below (which I posted already yesterday), has to be considered as one part (which consists of several small tasks) of a complex project.

source: http://www.axonactive.com/how-we-work/#working-process

Planning Part I (what?)
2 hours: 
This step is basically the meeting with the poker cards. During this planning meeting the attendance of the team and the PO is absolutely mandatory in order to achieve a common understanding.

Planning Part II (how?) 
2 hours:
During this meeting, the team is on itself (PO is not allowed at the meeting and the Scrum Master not required). The team then defines the architecture and does the detail planning.

Please do note, that these two meetings are basically the whole planning phase. As you can see in the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) circle this does just take 4 hours in total. So after 4 hours the whole planning for a part of the project is done and the Scrum Team will go into the Sprint. I personally think that this, if it is properly applied is an incredibly efficient way of going through the planning of a project.

Sprint
2 weeks:
About the Sprint I basically already told you. It is the actual work which is done and tracked with the Backlogs and Burndown charts introduced above. The teams work on the different stories and will try to finish all of them by the end of the two week Sprint. Daniel told me that since the teams have set their own targets they are highly motivated that those targets are also met.

Review, 
2 hours:
At the end of each Sprint there is a review. The teams then show what they have actually achieved and for each story it is decided whether the case can be closed or not. Daniel explained to me that a story cannot be closed even if there is just the documentation of one line of code missing.

The points which couldn't get closed go then into the next Scrum circle (Sprint respectively) and the whole process starts over again. If you are interested in more details (yes, this was actually just a more or less broad overview) you can have a look at the following PDF which is called SCRUM ON A PAGE: http://cdn.axonactive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/PDF-Scrum-on-a-Page.pdf

I hope I covered the main points of Scrum. Otherwise, I hope someone will let me know if I missed some important facts or did misinterprete something.

Daniel also introduced me to the concept of Kanban which I primarily know from production planning. I will now go into an even longer and more detailed description of this process. . .

I'm just joking guys :)  I guess those of you who are not really into this stuff suffered enough by now so I will go to another topic now which almost everybody likes; FOOD:)

Lunch

At Axon Active Vietnam, the employees are provided with lunch by the company. This is just one of the various benefits a company has to provide here if it wants to be considered a good employer. But I will go into that another day. 

However, today I went for lunch with the employees the first time. At 11:50 (not one minute later) everybody got up from their chairs and we were walking to the Axon Active house (they have a house where the POs can stay during their time in Vietnam). There, everybody took off their shoes (yes, not only in Switzerland it is considered rude to enter a house with shoes). I am happy I didn't wear flip flops though because otherwise I would probably never have found my own ones again :) Lunch was delicious and I had some very good conversations about Uber. Turns out, the Taxi drivers and the government in Vietnam are as unhappy as they are in Switzerland about the whole Uber situation. But Lunch was as delicious as it was fast. After just 10, or a maximum of 15 minutes everybody got up from the table again and left. 

So let me give a quick side remark to my friend Nicholas from Switzerland who will visit Vietnam as an exchange student next year and is one of the slowest eaters I've ever met. " You better learn to eat fast dude!" :) :) :) 

After lunch, it became clear that we had to leave the house because the second "lunch shift" from Axon Active Vietnam was already arriving. They always eat in shifts as there is not enough space in the house (some already had to eat in rooms upstairs) to cater for all of the employees at the same time. 

A question isn't necessarily a questions and a "yes" not necessarily a yes

Today I attended two meetings from which one was very technical and the other one more of an administrative nature. The latter was very interesting in terms of cultural differences as there was a situation where the supervisor asked one of the staff members if he could take care of a certain task. The staff member then replied with a yes but I could actually tell that the yes was not really a yes but more of a "I am not really sure if I can do that". After the meeting I asked Daniel whether my impression was correct. He then said to me that I was probably right but that I should also be aware that the question was not really to be considered as a question. 

I was already wondering about that before, because from my experience it is difficult for Vietnamese people to say "no" (in fact, this is also difficult for some Swiss people but that's a different story). At Axon Active Vietnam, however, this was one of the first times where I had the impression that a "yes" was not meant as a real "yes". Daniel informed me that a lot of people are actually working for the company quite some time which is why they have learned that a "no" can also be okay (see also the poker cards). 

Have a nice day!