Looking back to my Scrum Journey

Originally written in 2016

As a learner in the field of SCRUM, I developed an interest in getting more and more knowledge on how SCRUM is used as motivation in project management across various domains.

During various project cycles, being the core tester, I have also been switching roles and acting as temporary Scrum Master and Product Owner. This helped me in getting much closer to the other two roles. Now, managing a team of 25 plus testers who are working in SCRUM, Kanban and Scrumban, I have learnt the evolution of SCRUM and customized best fit solutions.

While acting as the Product Owner, I focused on learning more on Persona based User Stories, Prioritizing and Ranking User Stories and getting a real life understanding of Business Value that I used to deliver as a tester.

While acting as a Scrum Master, I focus on keeping the Scrum team in alignment with the Scrum framework and getting the issues resolved. The best part of being the Scrum Master is managing the Sprint Retrospectives which were very fruitful in identifying the action items for future sprints.

Transitioning from Waterfall to Agile has been the biggest teacher in my Agile Journey. Going through the various SCRUM and Kanban training sessions have helped a lot to be an Agile Thinker. Although accepting change is difficult in the beginning, but as we go along the path, it becomes a very acceptable reality. The concept of eradicating mini waterfalls within Sprints have helped us to grow as a team where the team continuously delivers and the burn down chart keeps moving. An innovative thing that we do is setting refactoring sprints after every 6 sprints with at least one potentially shippable item. This used to give the Development team some time in clearing out any of the previous sins within this sprint.

An important thing to mention is that while setting up a new project, we ensure to have the team bootstrapping meeting to set the expectation clear. Naming the team, the project, creating the vision statement, mission statement actually motivates the team in better connecting with the project and deliverable — more importantly, this creates a common understanding among the team. This is the first step of communication and collaboration with the pillar of transparency.

Now, within the organization, I work as an Agile Trainer in educating newbies and managers about Agile and SCRUM. With time, I am transforming those theoretical sessions to more activity & games based practical sessions. Learning while teaching gives more confidence on the subject and thus Agile has become a subject of great interest.

I strongly believe, Agile is the need of the hour and being Agile would help each professional to deliver the best results. Thank you.