When starting up a new Scrum team, you cannot assume that
the team starts sprinting right away.
Setting the foundation for the team
success is key!
Lyssa Adkins very well says in her book Coaching
Agile Teams that basically a new Agile team needs to learn 3 things:
- Learn about the Process (for instance the Scrum framework)
- Learn about the Team itself (starting from learning about one another as human beings and then setting the stage for self-organization and cross-functional behavior)
- Learn about the Product to build (i.e. learning about the work ahead)
But how can an Agile coach make the team learn that?
I normally take inspiration from an interesting story from
17th century to help the team learn in an organic way: the story of the Hudson 's Bay Company created by England 's King Charles II in 1670.
This company was (and
is still today) in the fur selling business: they provided supplies for the
hunters who went to the North Canada to hunt bears or foxes and bought animals
back from them to sell furs. After a while they
realized their business was affected by a lot of hunters dying because they
forgot essential supplies. Then in 1874 they developed a practice they called Hudson 's Bay Start.
They provisioned the
expedition with the necessary supplies. Then they sent the expedition team a
short distance in their canoes to camp overnight. This was a test, very necessary
so that, before finally launching into the unknown, one could see that nothing
has been forgotten or that, if one had taken too much, being so near to the
base, the mistake could be easily corrected.
In this part of Canada having
the right supplies in the correct amounts was literally a matter of survival!
As I said, I take inspiration from this story and normally
organize a Hudson 's
Bay Start for every newly formed Scrum team with a number of goals:
- remove the first impediments to start
- check the development environment
- start building the team
- buy time to groom the Product Backlog
- practice Scrum with a "safe failure" approach.
Therefore I ask to build a fake application (a bowling game tracker, for instance, but you can find many ideas at http://codingdojo.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?KataCatalogue) in order to get
the team away from the daily work and take them into a creative environment to
let them learn faster and have fun.
When you start something completely new it is better to go
out of your usual context, so that people are put on the same level (regardless
their starting point) and thus are not afraid to experiment and challenge
themselves.
The fake application creates the safe failure environment to
practice Scrum, but it must be implemented in the real system and developed by
using the actual tools, so that the development environment can be checked by really
trying it out.
With a Hudson Bay start,
you're less interested in the actual product and more interested in making sure
the development and deployment process works.
One could ask: Why are you spending precious team time to
build a fake application? Don't you have shipping deadlines to meet?
Of course we have, but it is also a matter of reducing risk.
The Hudson 's Bay Start was
not free for the Hudson 's
Bay Company either.
But the alternative for the hunters was dying in the wild!