Week 3, Scrum Mastering?!

“Actively doing Nothing” — that was the informal job description of being Scrum Master. What does that even mean???

Since I was neither an expert in ‘Agile values’, nor very knowledgeable in the technical aspects of our project (I had, like the rest of the team, not even heard of Lua before the start of this project), I had no clue on how I should be a good Scrum Master — I’ve always worked best behind the keyboard, where I’m in my comfort zone.

So, like every other time I had no idea what I was doing, I just consulted my best friend… Google! One of the first results I got was a forum post in scrum.org, titled “What does a Scrum Master do all day?” — Glad to know I wasn’t the only one who was puzzled over the role.

Reading the posts, I learned that one of the main duties of a Scrum Master is to aid in ‘Organizational Transformation’ — which is just a fancy way to say that they will help the Dev team adopt the Scrum model. This is be done by preaching the ‘Agile values’ and helping implement periodic Sprints. However, since we’ve been using the Scrum model for a couple of Sprints already, we didn’t need too much insight into the Agile way, so instead I chose to focus on the other big feature of being an SM: Coaching and causing any change that increases the productivity of the Scrum Team.

Specifically, I wanted to target the more ‘underperforming’ members of our team — the ones who I felt had more potential than what they had contributed thus far. I started with my roommate, PJ. In case I haven’t mentioned it before, we made a choice to use the Corona framework in Lua since it offers nice simulating feedback on a range of Android/iOS phones on top of a pretty straightforward language. The problem? PJ only has Linux on his laptop, which is incompatible with the Corona Labs Application. He tried dual-booting Windows on his laptop, but that proved to be too complicated and time-consuming.

While seeing PJ struggle, I remembered him previously making a comment on how he was surprised that his brother disliked the MacBook that he bought, and rarely uses it nowadays. So, I suggested the most simplest thing I could think of: “Why don’t you ask to borrow your brother’s Mac until the end of the term?” Though it might seem obvious in hindsight, the thought never occured to him previously. PJ immediately messaged his brother, and after a quick phone call, his brother not only lent him the MacBook, but gifted PJ the MacBook outright! And just like that PJ’s ability to contribute to the project went up a great deal. Not bad for my first day as Scrum Master!

Next, I had quickly come to the realization that despite knowing what my teammates do, I didn’t know exactly how they did it — which is pretty important if I want to actually help them increase their own productivity. Considering we don’t see each other too often and the fact that some members just aren’t as active in the group chat as others, I decided to just private message each member about what they have done, what problems they’re currently facing, and what they plan to do in the future.

I definitely gained pretty good insight into each of the members’ work and always left my ‘door open’, if they needed to ask me anything about the project or otherwise. One particular conversation was especially eye-opening: since we only have one graphic artist (May) due to the limitations of this project, I know that there is a lot of burden on her shoulders, thus I wanted to help May in any way I could. So I just asked her about the process she goes through with each image/animation sequence, and wanted to see if there was anywhere that the rest of our non-artistic group members could help with (see below). We identified and assigned members to help her with the more tedious framing and even just provide her inspiration for graphics.

After having many group meetings, we were getting into a bit of a routine — and if there is anything that learning Agile with P’Pond has taught me, it is to break boring routines. So, I changed things up a bit by having our meeting over dinner — and even invited a small focus group to get some feedback on our app thus far. Productive and different :)

Towards the end of the week, I had planned for us to go to a nearbyBoard Game Cafe for our meeting, and to get some ‘Research and Development’ for a potential minigame in our app. However, most of the team were getting overloaded by homework from other classes and midterm exams, so we just had a normal meeting and shelved the trip for another day. Due to the increasing workload, I made a decision as SM to let the team take a breather and focus on their other works (so I pestered them less towards the end of the week).

As a closing thought: at the start of the week, I did have a hard time seeing how I could be useful to the team by being Scrum Master given that we all had similar Agile knowledge anyway, but I believe it does help to have Batman helping from the shadows.

Especially if the Devs aren’t in regular contact with the rest of the team, the SM does help be the connection between teammates and provide vital support behind the scenes.