Chapter 03 - Scrum Aspects

24. Kano Analysis

Another of the techniques we use to do strategic planning for features and benefits is what's called the "Canoe model," developed by Noriyaki Canoe. What this effectively helps us do is identify where a particular feature fits in terms of customer expectations. Is this an excitement factor, something that's going to fundamentally differentiate this solution from something else in a way that's highly desirable? Is this a performance factor, something that is expected in order to satisfy customer needs for that particular solution, but that provides us a strong sense of the solution doing what it's supposed to do? Is this a disappointment? Is this something I don't want? I specifically don't want this thing to happen, or I would find that any solution that didn't have this very basic thing was somehow fundamentally defective. And then, lastly, are there certain features that are simply indifferent? Customers don't care very much about them. If the customer isn't going to care about it one way or another, I really don't want to spend a whole lot of time delivering it because it's not going to deliver the benefits the customer wants, either basic performance benefits or excitement factors.

25. Continuous Value Justification

Now, one of the things we've already said a couple of times is that a scrummaster is not a traditional project manager. You probably won't be surprised to see that traditional project management tools like Gantt charts don't work particularly well in scrum because they're focused on tracking perspective, percentage, and delivery of certain activities,not so much on the actual tangible, physical, and empirical evidence of a delivered solution. And so scrum instead recommends the use of some other tools for earned value analysis. How we're doing in terms of actual cost and value achieved relative to projected goals Or cumulative flow diagrams that allow us to show the tracking of how various features and your stories are produced and delivered by the team over time. which also have the effect of showing customers that, in fact, they do not have fixed requirements. that as we work our way through any project. We're inevitably going to identify new requirements. new user stories. There are new things that we're going to want, and that will drive additional activity on behalf of the business as well as on behalf of the scrum team to make sure that we're producing whole working solutions that reflect the changes in the work environment as well.

26. Confirm Benefits

One of the key concepts we introduced to Scrum is the notion of empiricism. I know it when I see it. And so one of the things we want to be able to do is regularly look at what we have and use that to make decisions about whether we need to make adaptations in various forms to make changes. So, regular demonstration of value is fundamental in Scrum. And having Sprint reviews, for example, where we're actually reviewing and demonstrating working solutions to customers that actually show value delivery to them, is fundamental for a number of different reasons. One, because we want to be able to demonstrate that we have successfully completed the user story, but also because it then helps us identify additional requirements from customers. Lots of times, customers don't really know all of their requirements until they see a potential solution, at which point they identify or share with us additional hidden requirements in place.Likewise, we can use tools like prototypes and simulations to allow customers to help us explore any missing requirements that they may have for certain aspects of the solution. So you'll notice that throughout Scrum, the focus is very much on demonstrable, tangible results and how those drive the achievement of value for the customer over the specific execution of activities and tasks. And if you're thinking back to the tools, for example, this demonstrates why a task centred view of the world like a Gantt chart is less important than the actual deliverable service and how well that's achieving value for the business.

So one of the other things we want to be able to identify with minimum marketable features is how soon I can actually deploy a solution to start getting value into customer hands. So, unlike traditional waterfall, where basically all of the value is deferred until the very end of the project, in Scrum and other agile methodologies, we want to get value into customer hands immediately, as soon as humanly possible. So, when do we have a minimal set of capabilities that are meaningfully sufficient to drive customer value that they should be deployed to production and used? And so one of the differences, for example, between individual Sprint plans and the release plan is that we want to ensure that the release plan reflects how soon we can get meaningful value into customer hands and that there's appropriate alignment between the Scrumteam's activities within various Sprints and the release plan for the overall solution for the organization.

27. Lesson: Quality

It's important as a Scrum master to think about all of our stakeholders when we start thinking about how we would produce quality relative to our solution. Obviously, for our teams, we want them to be able to produce products and deliverables that will meet customer acceptance criteria and meet the formal definition established by the product owner. At the same time, the broader objective, of course, is even clearer. We want to be able to deliver business value to the customer. And so in the Scrum framework, we try to integrate activities within each of our sprints to be able to optimise quality appropriately, manage change effectively, and manage risk effectively. And one of the things that we do, quite frankly, is continual testing of solutions to identify appropriate quality issues, to identify, you know, how in fact we improve the overall quality of our solution each round through refactoring activities, and to be able to drive particular quality in the deliverable.

That really sets the stage for higher-quality solutions downstream as well. One of the ways I like to describe this to my teams is that each solution we produce is really a platform for change. Almost all of the things that we deliver will change again and again and again over the full life cycle of the programme and over the lifecycle of that particular product or service. So one of the things we really want to do is ensure that we're not accumulating technical debt that will end up being paid later when somebody needs to go and try to make changes to our code. So this is one of the reasons why we spend so much energy throughout a Scrum project doing refactoring activities and improving the quality of the code itself. Not so much because we're trying to add new functionality, but because we want to improve and streamline how efficiently and effectively the code produces the results. This quality is reflected in the scope of the solution, and the quality is reflected in the acceptance criteria. And in addition, our Scrum guidance body may demand that certain minimum quality requirements be delivered by any Scrum team that is working within our organization.

28. Quality Definition

When we create user stories and establish them within a product backlog, we also want to be able to identify how we would, in fact, measure whether or not that user story was effectively delivered. And we're going to call this the user story acceptance criteria. Alright? An order for a user's story to be accepted is done. It has to do two things It has to meet the broad organizational definition of "done" and it has to meet the specific criteria associated with that particular user story. So it's the job of the product owner to set the appropriate minimum acceptance criteria for each of the user stories, and where appropriate, these may even be inherited from broader program management or portfolio management objectives.

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