Should Scrum teams aim to be done or to be perfect? The answer is that Done is better than Perfect. The team’s job is to ship product, not to be perfect. So don’t the let the perfect be the enemy of the MVP.
Most teams think that setting a high quality bar with Definition of Done (DOD) ensures high quality. Admittedly, this is true but only to a point. Long work to meet an overly stringent DOD can lead to less frequent delivery, i.e., less frequent feedback. Unless you are a Waterfall Nostradamus of perfect foresight, infrequent feedback guarantees building things wrong and building the wrong things.
Now let’s answer four related DOD questions and see if the answers also apply to the Definition of Ready (DOR):
How high should you set the bar for Definition of Done?
Document a DOD which is your definition of absolute perfection. Then rank the DOD quality checks from 1 to n by their quality value add. Move any infeasible checks to the bottom of the list (but note them for subsequent retrospection and possible feasibility solution. Finally, move down the list to an achievable point for the current sprint and draw a line. Everything above the line is your DOD for this sprint. The same process works for the DOR.
Should the Same Definition of Done Apply to all Stories?
Yes if your stories are similar enough to allow for it. Creating multiple DODs adds to cognitive overload and the chance of chasing the wrong definition. Conversely, the DOD for a story about a software feature should not be applied to a story about a marketing guide. The same goes for the DOR.
Should the Definition of Done Change Every Sprint?
Scrum owes its popularity in large part to its simplicity. Scrum teams quickly learn the process and agree on. the DOD and DOR in Sprint Zero. From there, they focus on working software delivery rather than on the Scrum process. Changing the DOD will add friction as the team must renegotiate the DOD and relearn old habits.
If the sprints are similar, there is little reason to change the DOD, however the sprints may not be dissimilar. For example, what if the sprint goals are radically different? What if the team must deliver to an externally imposed and unreasonable deadline? In cases where the sprints are radically different, then change the DOD. Teams should still go for less DOR change than DOD change when the sprints are different.
Should the Definition of Done Requirements Bar be Raised Every Sprint?
The more stringent the DOD, the higher your quality will be subject to the constraint that you continue to release frequently. If a Scrum team prizes quality over quantity, then it should aim to raise the DOD bar whenever velocity increases. Often new DOD requirements and velocity increases are the same thing, e.g., adding BDD requirements to the DOD may simultaneously increase velocity. The same goes for the DOR.
olocation out. Social distancing in. Every Scrum team is now a virtual team. There will be no training and no prep time–just Zoom. So pronounced the pandemic.
Scrum teams can take this time to level up their virtual Scrum skills so that they maintain delivery and ultimately emerge stronger than ever. The following five techniques practiced by professional YouTube vloggers improve team communication and connectedness.
Basic YouTuber Setup
1.
Control Composition
Composition includes what is in your WebCam shot and how it is framed. Follow the photographer’s Rule of Thirds, a guideline which says the most important thing in the shot, which is you, should be the main focus and take up most of the frame.
Place your eye-level one third of the way down from the top of the screen. Positioning your your webcam on top of your monitor or on a small tripod should do the trick. To command more attention, place yourself dead center and look straight on. For relaxed participation, you can move your nose to one third from the left and turn your head thirty degrees back to the right with two thirds of the frame in front of you. Either way, keep your shoulders on camera.
Once set, double check for facial distortion caused by the wide angle lens on your webcam. If you need to move further from the computer, remember to reposition your eyes one third of the way down. Throughout the meeting try not to negate your perfect rule-of-thirds framing by rocking to and fro or leaning away from the camera.
Good, Bad and Ugly WebCam Photo Examples
GOOD
UGLY -- Upward camera angle requires keeping head pointed down to avoid unsightly under chin view
BAD -- Back Lighting
BAD -- Bobble head needs body
BAD -- Rear side Lighting
GOOD -- Angled good for relaxed moments
BAD -- Far from camera creates emotional distance
Expert Tip: Dock the Zoom images of the meeting participants near your webcam so that you can make eye contact looking at them and the camera simultaneously.
Frame yourself well in front of a neutral but not sterile background, e.g. in front of a bookcase. Angle the camera to avoid odd looks such as a ceiling fan in your ear.
Clear all the clutter around you and don’t stop after clearing breakfast burritos, and bobbleheads. The only things on camera should be things intentionally placed there. Don’t let a pillow from the bed behind you rise into view.
Pick a “broadcast studio” location which minimizes the number of unintentional disruptions from family, pets, and noises. If your webcam films the route to the bathroom or the kitchen, don’t be surprised to see your kid running behind you with no shirt on. Also pick a spot which does not need setup or cleanup to live broadcast when you get a surprise Zoom request from your Scrum Master.
2.
Control Sound Quality
Microphone Comparison
External Microphone vs. Computer Microphone
External Condenser Microphone with Shock Mount(Blue Yeti)
Computer Microphone(Macbook Air)
Sound canceling headphones are a great addition to your home office. Never again will you need to ask your Product Owner to repeat themselves because your spouse’s loud Zoom session in the home office next door. Consider Sony MDR-7506 headphones which do the home office job without the music aficionado price tag.
Most people are unaware that their computer’s microphone makes them sound like a tin can and picks up ambient noise pollution To fix it, get yourself the highest quality condenser microphone that you can afford. It’s also great to add a shock mount accessory to prevent vibrations from traveling up the microphone diaphragm. The Blue Yeticaster fits the bill.
Expert Tip: Rather than talking into the microphone, point the microphone at your chest to get the deep voice of a radio disc jockey.
Avoid empty apartment sound by broadcasting from a place with sound deadening material such as curtains or a comforter.
3.
Use Proper Exposure
First and foremost, get a top quality webcam like the Logitech Brio. The camera on your laptop is low quality video and looks up at your double chin and nostrils.
Ideally, face a window while the natural light illuminates your face. Whether using natural light or lamp light, avoid back lighting and reserve bottom lighting for horror movies.
After shining light on the front of your face, you can improve your exposure by going for three, four, or even five point lighting. In my setup, I sit with a huge window on my right, twoLume Cube LED lights stuck to the far corners of my monitor, a light directly overhead and track lighting in the background.
Expert Tip: Control your Lume Cubes with the Lume-X phone app for precise dimming capability and to avoid colleagues looking down your shirt as you adjust lighting during a weather changes. Do be aware that the Lume-X app will detect and control your spouse’s Lume Cube in the home office next to you. I once turned my wife’s light on and off while she Zoomed her manager.
Let us conclude this exposure discussion by stating what should be obvious–don’t turn off your video for long stretches. People will think you are either anti-social or you have no clothes on. If you need to do something personal for a moment, people will appreciate momentary darkness.
4.
Color Grade
To look sharp, consider wearing a single color top for a business meeting. Reserve wild plaids and printed T-shirts for virtual happy hour. Avoid hot colors like orange and red as well as colors which blend in with your background. Finally, where nice pants or skirt which match your top so you are free to stand up.
Expert Tip: Use an app like iGlasses on the Mac to control control the color saturation and white balance of your webcam.
Try to avoid Zoom’s artificial background especially if you wear glasses or headphones because Zoom’s silhouette algorithm can give you a bad haircut or electric glasses.
5.
Be Ergonomic
Virtual work is now more prevalent and long-term than simply checking emails on sick days. To perform your best, don’t accept hunching over a laptop squinting. Invest in a good monitor, desk, and chair.
Give yourself freedom to move by getting a solid wood desk so bumps don’t jiggle your audio and video equipment. The desk should be at least two feet deep to put proper space between you and your monitor. The desk should also be wide enough to move your arms and to place multiple monitors.
Avoid constraining short and tangled wires by ordering long wires and plugging them into a USB hub. Use wireless mice and look for a boom arm for your microphone which has wire housing. You may even want to order a desk with built in USB ports for your Lume Cubes.
Many people overlook lighting when considering ergonomics. Always remember to adjust your monitor brightness to account for changing light conditions. Also if your room is very dark after hours, backlighting your monitor reduces both eyestrain and associated back and neck strain.
Expert Tip: Gaming chairs aka racing chairs are worth looking at for their athletic aesthetics alone but the also offer excellent ergonomics. They stabilize your mousing arm and support long gaming sessions in comfort.
Conclusion
Strive to build up to practicing all five YouTuber techniques but most importantly, get started with one of them and go from there. Overcome all impediments like a Scrum Master. Have fun and go forth and conquer virtual Scrum communication.
Citations: All photos by James Massa except the featured Scrum team photo by Elijah O’Donnell and the remote worker photo by Djordje Petrovic, both from Pexels. Microphone audio by comparison by James Masssa. Embeded promotional videos and product links for Blue Microphones, Lume-Cubes, and Sony headphones were developed by said companies which did not compensate me for their use.
n May, 2001, three months after the Snowbird 17 signed the Agile Manifesto , my colleague arranged a July 28 blind date for me in Kiev, Ukraine. I knew my date’s name, Nataliya, but it was a real blind date without even a profile to read. Moreover, we didn’t speak the same language. I spoke only English and Nataliya spoke only Russian and Ukrainian.
So I learned to speak Russian in three months and had a perfect blind date that lasted four days until August 2. Then—in Russian—I proposed. And she said, Da!
James and Nataliya in the former Soviet Union.
I went on to say my wedding vows in Russian. That is my language success story and this blog shares the Agile methodologies that I succeeded with and what I’ve learned retrospectively. It would be years before I formally practiced Scrum but I intuitively followed Agile Scrum principles to learn conversational Russian efficiently.
I followed the four steps below which require two hours and $12 up front plus one hour per day for ninety days. I offer no love guarantees but promise you quick language success if you follow my four Agile steps. Follow my harder fifth step to tackle the toughest jobs such as accent reduction. In line with Scrum prioritization principles, I emphasized doing the steps in the priority order below as well as prioritizing the work within each step. I iterated over all four steps repeatedly.
Step 1: Ninety-Two Seinfeld Verbs Девяносто два русских глагола
I started by watching two hours of Seinfeld reruns and wrote down every verb used. I reasoned that if I learned these two hours of verbs then I could survive a date. Jerry and cast used ninety-two verbs which translated to learning just one verb per day for three months. I placed top priority on my step one verbs which constituted my Minimum Viable Product (MVP). My Definition of Done was clear — learn all ninety two verbs in the present tense. Following Agile Scrum ways, I regularly iterated over my learned Russian verbs to perfect my knowledge of them.
Step 2: Russian Sweet Nothings Русские сладкие пустяки
James and Nataliya in Saint Petersburg, Russia
As next priority, I asked three Russian colleagues to share every Russian sweet nothing that they knew. I ordered and learned them from most basic and common like meelaya maya (my sweetie),golupka maya (my dove) and solnishka maya (my sunshine) to romantic showstoppers like dama maeva serdtsa (queen of my heart). I showcased my progress with my colleagues to develop an inspect and adapt feedback loop.
Step 3: Frequency Focus Фокус частоты
I soon found learning one verb and one sweet nothing per day too easy so I spent $12 on a book with an ordered list of the most frequently used Russian words. I allotted time to learn twelve nouns from the book each day plus the one verb and one sweet nothing. By remembering more words than I forgot, my vocabulary reached over 1,000 words in three months.
Learning the first thousand most frequently used words of a language will allow you to understand 76.0% of all non-fiction writing, 79.6% of all fiction writing and an astounding 87.8% of all oral speech.
–Lingo Mastery
Step 4: Don’t Need it? Don’t Learn it. Не нужно? Не учись этому.
I didn’t bother with adjectives because they are not needed to express who did what when. Learning adverbs might have helped but I had to cut a corner somewhere so I skipped them. I also, gained efficiency by skipping common words that I don’t use, e.g., I skipped cigarette because I don’t smoke.
Ready for Kiev
With all four language learning steps completed, I boarded the plane to Kiev ready to share my inner feelings in Russian. To reduce risk of conversation block failure, I brought along a hand held translator which did indeed help when I didn’t know the noun that went with one of Seinfeld’s verbs.
I hit it off with doragaya loobeemaya maya (my dear love), Nataliya. We got engaged, got married, and remain married eighteen years later. Nataliya followed my language strategy to learn English and get an accounting job at PWC.
Step 5: Final Secrets Последние секреты
James and Nataliya in Saint Petersburg, Russia
After marriage, I continued my Russian studies and learned two final secrets to share. I got an in-country tutor on convenient Skype at the in-country price of $15/hour. Ultimately, I visited him at his St. Petersburg school for two weeks of all day lessons. Agile Scrum emphasizes team co-location for good reason–proximity breeds closeness and communication.
Skype tutors and in-country immersion are the capstone to my system. Although more expensive and time consuming, they provided the feedback loop and motivation I needed to approach native speaker ability, especially for accent reduction.
Indeed, Russians I meet think I’m a native speaker as long as I’m talking or if they aren’t funny. I understand bad jokes but still struggle with a surprising twist of Russian humor. No worries, if I miss a joke, I laugh along with the crowd and think of Jerry Seinfeld.
Citations: Wedding video footage by Chris Pettograsso. All photos by anonymous street bypassers.
y Manhattanite wife and I have been house-poor since we bought a vacation home in the Hamptons in 2016. We wanted to buy in the lively Southampton Village center but expensive village prices forced us out to Water Mill, a hamlet known for large private lots separated by farmland and woods. As the corona crisis approached in late February, our profligate privacy purchase became a social distancing sanctuary for me, my wife and our two young kids.
Our Hamptons Hideout. Photo by Corcoran Real Estate
Leveraging my Agile Scrum project management expertise, I ran a two-week Scrum sprint with the goal of isolating our family in both safety and comfort. I wrote down each Scrum story “ToDo” item on a Post-it note and stuck them all to our radiator. Only I got the information radiator joke but it helped boost my spirits in a stressful time.
I acted as family product owner and wrote and prioritized story Post-its. I grouped the stories into thematic Scrum epics. I made an epic to order protective equipment such as masks, medicine, and Purell and another to stockpile paper towels and toilet paper. I made an epic to order long shelf-life food such as Ramen, dried fruit, and cereal as well as protein bars, cookies, and shakes and another epic to address things that require human contact, e.g., going to the barber and the dentist. Finally, I made epics to prepare two home offices and a home gym.
My son at Choppin Charlie’s Barber Shop in Sag Harbor, NY
Every morning, my family team met for a fifteen-minute Scrum standup. Each person reviewed what we accomplished since yesterday, e.g., I packed kids clothes for summer, what we would do today, and what blockers we faced, e.g., Amazon is out of Purell.
By Saturday March 08, New York State had 105 reported corona cases1 of which only one was in Southampton.2 So when my employer announced work from home plans on Thursday, March 12 we decided to evacuate that night. Before leaving, I tried to order fresh food to the Hamptons but was too late–all delivery time slots were sold out.
Evacuating, my family skipped the elevator and carried bags fourteen flights downstairs. The garage attendant handed me our car key through a crack in his office door. I wiped down the key and the steering wheel and drove out of the Big Apple feeling one thousand times safer leaving Manhattan’s population of 1.6 million for Water Mill’s 1,600.3
The Manhattan apartment we evacuated
On Friday, March 13, I reviewed our sprint progress and priorities calculating that our supplies would last a short month of the long-term crisis. Moreover, we would suffer serial cereal dinners for a month. So I put on my mask and nitrile gloves and went for another shopping iteration to perfect our sprint.
I returned home with swordfish, hamburgers, and pineapples for grilling. The next day I went back for more but found the store stripped bare. There was no chicken, no beef, and no eggs. No napkins and no coffee nowhere. The only bread was rye so I took the last three loaves telling myself that rye isn’t that bad.
Our survival stockpile met our Definition of Done
There was plenty of cake though so I picked one up for my birthday coming on Sunday. The frozen shrimp freezer remained untouched. Apparently, prawns are not comfort food. And not enough people like sardines to sell them out despite their long shelf life and super food status.
I shopped every aisle methodically scavenging. Shoppers stayed six feet apart and if anyone got closer, they turned their heads and politely said, “excuse me” for entering my space.
After shopping on that Saturday, March 14, we went birding at Elizabeth Morton Wildlife Refuge. We thought a walk through the forest to the beach would be a safe enjoyable exercise. Others had the same idea. Normally there are fifteen cars there on a weekend but we found the fifty-car lot overflowing out to the street.
Several birders offered my kids sunflower seeds to feed the birds out of their palms. I said, “Thank you, we have our own seeds and do love to feed the chickadees, just avoiding avian corona flu today.” Later, I read ominous news that a Bronx Zoo tiger got coronavirus.
Beach at Elizabeth Morton Wildlife Refuge
Forest at Elizabeth Morton Wildlife Refuge
Red Tailed Hawk at Elizabeth Morton Wildlife Refuge
On Sunday, March 15, I completed the home gym epic by purchasing a squat rack and bench from theBenchPress.comas a birthday present to myself because all gyms were shut down. I ordered from the owner operator, Tony Soto, who assured me that, “It’s warm and business as usual in Florida.” He took an extra five minutes to share a motivational speech on how we will all get through corona, no need to panic. It was five minutes well spent.
Between Tony and my blissfully ignorant kids, I had a happy birthday showcase sheltered in place with all epics completed and all acceptance criteria met.
Papa, I like to eat the s’mores. You hold your nose and eat the rye.
–Zayden Massa 7 year old son
Post family sprint, I took the kids to the beach for a bonfire retrospective ceremony with s’mores, I interviewed my son who will start Zoom virtual first grade next week. I asked him how has the food been since we’ve been in the Hamptons in Scrum retrospective style: What should we start eating, what should we stop eating and what should we continue eating? His reply summed up the corona crisis for me: “Papa, I like to eat the s’mores. You hold your nose and eat the rye.”
