I have been reading a number of discussions recently about problems in the Scrum Retrospective. Things such as “it’s a waste of time”, “do we really have to do it” and “no one brings up the problems we have just encountered” to “the Scrum Master solves all the problems in the retrospective”.

The Retrospective is really the key meeting where the team can grow and the team members can put in place decisions to grow personally. However if no one is contributing, or some members don’t contribute, it’s not going to be effective. Ineffective Retrospectives are also going to lead to burnout.

Here are three tips for improving Scrum Retrospectives

Tip 1. Get everyone to speak within the first five minutes. If quiet members don’y speak up within the first five minutes, they probably wont contribute. Doing a “go round” is a good idea. Instruct everyone to go around and say IN TWO WORDS how the Sprint went for them. This forces everyone to say something.

Tip 2 Prepare some key questions for the retrospective such as “What went well this sprint?” and “What could we improve on?” Prepare some specific questions about the actual Sprint you just completed.

Tip 3 Make it informal. Order lunch and make sharing lunch part of the process. This brings down barriers and frees people up to start speaking their mind. Be careful not to let the noisy ones dominate this.

Tip 4 If you can’y do lunch, you could try Retrospective Cookies. These Chinese style Fortune Cookies with a difference are a fun way of asking questions. It’s social, its food and it taps into our hierarchy of needs (see Maslow). This is how it works

Order the Retrospective Cookies (only $10). Each team member takes a cookie, opens it and one by one reads the question and answers it. Let the team write down what they think about the question. Discuss the answers and facilitate a discussion about the issues which come up.

The cookies contain questions such as:-

• What was the most effective thing you did this Sprint, and why was it so successful?
• Does our current release plan reflect reality? Why or why not?
• What was our Team’s biggest impediment this Sprint?
• What was the most helpful thing the Scrum Master did this Sprint? Why was it helpful?
• What 3 things could the team do to help improve communication during Sprints?

I think it’s a great way to start of with a new team, for Retrospectives which are problematic or with a team with shy/dominant  people.

We’ve all seen this headline. It had to happen. 50 million downloads of an app in just 50 days.  This makes Draw Something the fastest growing mobile game of all time.

“We believe it’s not only the fastest growing original mobile game of all time – 50 days to hit 50 million downloads – but one of the fastest growing web sensations that we’ve seen,” Zynga said in a statement.

It just highlights how a company such as OMGPOP can take an existing product, namely Pictionary, port it to mobile, make it social and bingo! It took Facebook 9 months to reach 1 million users. It took OMGPOP just 9 days to reach 1 million Draw Something users. OMG!

But how? The secret ingredient was its very social, asynchronous gameplay. Most game designers don’t support a mobile-social gaming network, like the one which was acquired by Japanese gaming giant GREE for $104 million last year.

Products like the Israeli SDK Nextpeer, provide synchronous gameplay, meaning that players had to be available at the same time. Bolting on social game play to existing app store games, could mean a dramatic boost in downloads.

Their cutesy presentation says it all. Might steal their presentation style for a future speech or presentation.

I liked this article on TechCrunch recently about the  “pull-to-refresh” UI feature  used in many iOS apps, especially those with live data feeds such as social network apps. I had assumed that this was a standard Apple preferred UI for menu based screen refresh and part of the core UI framework . However we learn from TechCrunch that the  “pull-to-refresh” action is covered by a patent application titled “User Interface Mechanics” – by Loren Brichter, creator of Tweetie.

The  “pull-to-refresh” is such an obvious UI feature, it’s hard to imagine that the guys from Apple DIDN’T think it up. If they didn’t think it up then they cant patent it. Had they done this then it could have gone into core and we could all use it.

Being passionate about patents, following my own patent I was  interested to see if the patent owners are going to do anything about their patent. Twitter now own the patent, which goes after not only the “pull to refresh” action but anything that issues a command on pulling down a menu. Really! ” pulling down a menu”? Surely this UI is for all iOS developers.

It looks like everyone has been caught off guard (except for those with huge in-house counsel). It’s one of those little things that flew under the radar until a perfect storm of reblogging caught everyone off guard. (Cough, ahem.) Apple apparently uses uses pull-to-refresh in some of its own internal apps. (Yep it does.) It hasn’t appeared on any public apps though!

Not being very Barnes and Nobley here in the UK, prior to last weeks Mobile Monday presentation by this book seller, I had never heard of a Nook  ’Reader Tablet‘. This appears to be the B&N competitor to the Amazon Kindle Fire, based on Android.

Claudia Romanini toldus, that 70% of the millions of Nooks sold had been bought by women aged between 25-45. She said: ‘Our customer is not technical. She most likely has a smartphone but is not a big app consumer. She’s a little afraid of data consumption so won’t download a lot of apps.’

Tablets are increasingly being used by late adopters, particularly in the shared family environment. Some possible usage scenarios, suggested by the panel are:-

• Silver-surfer can grasp and use immediately and confidently, exploring content, without the complication of a desktop OS.
• Children using for reading and entertainment. Especially shared time with a parent 1:1
• Collaborative browsing and sharing within family, ie. between partners (I will talk about that again later)
• Consuming rather than creating content but this will change with more apps as tablets become take over from laptops for mobile computing

B&N  included some interesting US figures

• 70% of households that have a tablet… Children use parents tablets… Mainly for Games, education applications and viewing videos
• 21% of tablet use is in bed… Reading? Browsing?
• 75% Android internet access is over 3G
• 75% iOS internet access over wifi. Are iOS Users more content hungry or iOS more content rich?
• 90% of Internet traffic generated by mobile devices are from iOS devices
• 30% tablet usage in front of TV only 20% smartphone. Suggesting different modes of mobile usage and users?

Within the Consumer Market, tablet internet access increases post work hours. Tablets are being used in conjunction with entertainment and media as they are a comfortable format for consuming such content. In the Enterprise Market they are even more powerful and portable than their laptop cousins, due to their size to weight ratio, that will only get better with advances in technology.

Google always claimed that Android was not Linux, but now finally all that has been put aside and Android is back as part of Linux. When Android and Linux forked, the new Android code was never put back into Linux, but now that has changed and Android has been merged back in. That is except for those stupid lock types which were created by the Android team. Anyway, Android will now compile under Linux .

Today, you can compile the Android code in Linux 3.3 and it will boot. Still, as Kroah-Hartman warned, WakeLocks, still aren’t in the main kernel, but even that’s getting worked on. For all essential purposes, Android and Linux are back together again.

Monday Morning funnies for all Scrum enthusiasts. How will your daily stand up go tomorrow? Other penalties for Stand Up latecomers include making them sing a song…

Putting a group of people with different skills together and calling them a cross functional team is not the same as creating a Scrum Team. A group of people waiting for a bus is not a team (of course) so why is it a team when Josie from UX and Graham from Architecture and Simon from development come together on a Scrum Product Development?

When a group of people come together to form a team, it is the Scrum Master‘s responsibility to facilitiate the team self organising into a performing team. Psychologists such as Bruce Tuckman  have described how teams go through the stages of Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing as they collectively develop team skills.

One of the key reasons you would want to develop a team rather than a collection of individuals in a Scrum Development, is because a collaborative development leads to emotional buy-in and personal commitment to success. Over the years I have attended a number of workshops and have spent a whole weekend in Kangeroo Valley, Australia improving my team coaching and collaboration skills.

The Kangeroo Valley Operation Challenge is a really clever way of experiencing and developing the skills a team needs to become highly performing. Skills such as listening, not loosing information, respecting each other, cooperation, collaboration and iterative problem solving. The actual activities must remain a secret (for future teams) but I recently came across another widely used game called the Marshmallow Challenge.

This game has been used by Tom Wujec (who studies how we share and absorb information) typically in team building workshops and thousands of people have played it across the world. This game is really simple. Teams of four have to build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and a marshmallow. The marshmallow has to be placed on top of the spaghetti structure.

In the game, teams usually follow a pattern of behaviour not dissimilar to The Apprentice (on BBC TV). These including orienting themselves to the task, a power struggle, appointing a leader and coming up with a strategy. Inevitably they end up with a structure and with seconds to spare place the marshmallow on top and then it all crashes down. Different groups of people have different levels of success. The MBAs or Business School Students turn out to be a bit hopeless. They are worse than average, as are lawyers. The big surprise however is that  Kindergarten children tend to be much better! This is even true when the game was played at the Singularity University (attended by the world’s brightest thinkers).

What kids do differently is that they start with the marshmallow, and they build prototypes, successive prototypes, always keeping the marshmallow on top, so they have multiple times to fix when they build prototypes along the way. we know this  type of collaboration as the essence of an Agile iterative process right. And with each version, kids get instant feedback about what works and what doesn’t work.

The usual winners of the game are architects. Fortunately they understand construction, structures and stresses and how best to use their architectural knowledge to for a load bearing structure from spaghetti.

From a team building perspective though, the best combination of skills appear  in  teams of CEOs playing with their admin assistants. The admin assistants facilitate the process and keep it on track. So the capacity to play in prototype is the key to success in the Marshmallow Challenge. Developing specialised skills and facilitating the skills are the combination that leads to strong success. These were the exact same learnings from Operation Challenge in Australia.

Take away

The first principle of Scrum is putting people first right. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Getting a group of people to form a team and then grow to understand the power of collaboration is one of the keys to successful product development and one of the key roles of the Scrum Master. In the Marshmallow Contest, we learnt about  innovation, creativity, teams, collaboration, as well as the value of early prototyping and incremental delivery. Part of the real power of the game is in helping people to identify the hidden assumptions that every project has, and to recognize the value in diversity of team membership.

This is a great post that uses the familiar metaphor of the gym and physical fitness to apply to adopting Agile. I’ve seen the pattern described here too often.

Developers start out the first three sprints and produce production ready software every iteration. It seems like everything is going well. Then under the gun of the Scrum Master to keep their velocity high, they build up technical debt (like sprinters developing lactic acid) by not paying attention to technical excellence and practices that will maintain a sustainable pace. This slows their speed to a halt until they clean up their technical practices and adopt test driven development, continuous integration, mercilous refactoring.

The question for me is not whether or not this pattern occurs, but how to best introduce Agile so teams can recognize when it is happening and address it.

On the Scrum side, folks like Mike Cohn suggest introducing Scrum first (using the iterative or requirements first pattern described in his outstanding Agile Adoption presentation). This has the advantage of allowing the team to self organize around the practices needed to maintain agility.

On the XP side, folks like James Shore recommend introducing the 12 XP Practices first (Mike Cohn describes this as “Technical Practices First” Pattern). The tradeoffs to Jim’s approach is that it is costly to start with all 12 practices from day one. Teams may reject the approach altogether, while getting none of the benefits of the practices. But the teams that do will have sustainable pace and agility.  The benefits to Iterative first or requirements first are that the teams learn how to self organize and undergo the cultural change necessary for bottom up commitment based planning. The downside is that Scrum is silent on engineering principles, and focuses on developing a self healing system rather than prescriptive practices. The down side to this is that teams may fail. Yet if they are using the retrospective and sprint review effectively, however, effects of failure are minimized (since they can inspect and adapt) and teams will have the added benefit of becoming a self healing system.

My experience is that the end state of having Scrum teams that us XP is a great combination. The paths to getting there are varied, and I’d rather a group learn how to think for itself then think implementing a set of practices will make them Agile. It’s the mind set shift to Agile principles that is important in my opinion, not the discrete practices used.  This prevents Agile and Scrum from becoming yet another prescriptive methodology that says “do these steps in these ways and you will be guaranteed success”.

Samsung has really made an impact in the Smartphone market this year. This Korean company has backed Android and really made a big impact int he market place. Samsung was the first to come back at Apple’s iPad with an Android tablet. It didn’t sell, so it ditched it and moved to a larger version, while its smartphone division worked overtime to produce more and better phones.

Samsung’s is a hardware manufacturer. Is does innovation well. It doesn’t do software. By focussing on just the hardware, Samsungs mission statement for 2011 was to become the worlds largest smartphone shipper by end of third quarter. Whether they achieved it or not remains to be announced, but they have certainly become a leader in the top end smartphone sector.

Watch out in 2012 for more great Samsung phones.

Scrum Planning in Gummy Bears

I just love these cartoons. This probably means nothing to non Scrum people, but to anyone who has wrestled with Scrum Release Planning then this may create a smile. Of course the point is, it doesn’t matter whether the estimates are in User Story Points or Gummy Bears, since the measure is relative. I steer away from Ideal Days, since it may urge the chickens to convert it into hours or real days (which should never be allowed).