Are you investing enough to build a cross-functional Scrum team?
Many people join my Professional Scrum Master (PSM) or Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO) training from multiple companies. Their organization primarily sponsors them, and few are self-sponsored to advance their careers in Scrum Mastery or Product Ownership role. The majority of classes are private workshops and that demonstrate care for agility within enterprises. Scrum Master and Product Owner workshops are needed to start practicing Scrum. But what kind of workshop organization’s running for the Scrum developers? What workshop are your developers attending to gain knowledge related to development team practices? How are you teaching them self-management and self-discipline? Is your team a cross-functional feature or component team?
I rarely get invited to facilitate the Scrum Developer workshop. I did try to figure out what enterprises are doing for developers.
Here are my findings:
- No training for developers and Scrum Masters are expected to tell them how Scrum works. There is nothing wrong with this approach provided Scrum Masters having in-depth experience in Scrum, which is not true in many cases.
- They are asking developers to go through some video programs. Video programs are not as helpful as in-person training.
- Facilitate some in-house training on the basics of Scrum and agile. These are good for awareness but not enough to build self-managed teams.
What is a Cross-Functional Team?
How are you helping to build a better cross-functional and self-managed team? Hoping you are not ignoring but are you having suitable workshops for them? What do you do for people working on Salesforce, Oracle ERP, Java Development, UX design, Database, .Net Development, Open Source Platform, Mainframe or Embedded Technologies as Developer, Testers or Business Analyst?
I am raising these questions based on my interaction with the development team while facilitating the Scrum Developer workshop. Usually, developers, testers, and business analysts attend this workshop. I typically hear that organization promoting only the Scrum Framework workshop and nothing specific to the development team role. Some organizations are also organizing workshops for TDD, CI, etc. but mainly tools training and not practices.
What do developers want?
Since Scrum has become a widely accepted framework for agile software development, most organizations are already practicing Scrum or Scrum + Something. It has become vital to have your development team members go through the role-specific workshop to learn practices that can help them be more efficient and effective.
Workshops should focus more on practices and the importance of these practices rather than only tools. If they go only for JUnit, DBunit, Jenkins, or cucumber training, they will most likely misuse these tools. Being a developer, I will not use these tools properly unless I am not sure how these practices and tools are helping me. Maybe this is one the biggest reason for the team ignoring engineering practices, and technical debts keep increasing sprint by sprint. These are based on interactions with development team members while facilitating the Certified Scrum Developer workshop.
What must discuss while facilitating the Scrum workshop to developers?
Scrum: It goes by default because the workshop name is Certified Scrum Developer, but the idea should help them understand how Scrum enables them to make decisions faster.
Extreme Programming (XP): Extreme programming has been described as a set of practices for developing software collaboratively. Some of them must have to produce a quality product such as the Test-First approach and continuous integration.
Lean: It is thinking based on system thinking, respect for people, removing waste, and continuous improvement. It helps developers understand the importance of emergent design, faster feedback, and various underlying principles of agile software development.
Scaling: Developers should know what is expected from them while working with multiple scrum teams. Introductions to few popular scaling frameworks help in setting the right expectations.
DevOps: Knowing DevOps culture helps developers to understand the importance of collaboration with operations. They should have complete knowledge about operations to contribute to promoting a culture of DevOps. Knowing about the continuous delivery pipeline, infrastructure as code, and production monitoring always helps in reducing differences.
Better to invest in building awesome Scrum Developers and not just excellent Scrum Masters and Product Owners. Although an excellent Scrum Master can help in developing a high-performing Scrum team so don’t investing in them either :)
