As with all of the project groups within the Guardian’s digital development department, the team behind Guardian Soulmates is no different in our approach to Agile software development, and we too have implemented Scrum.
Scrum is an Agile framework for managing projects and products, often used in software development to allow iteration and incremental work as complex applications are built.
In practice, this means that first thing each morning, we have a quick five-to-10 minute “standup” meeting, where each member of the development team discusses what they did the day before, what they will work on that day, and any issues that need to be highlighted across the team.
Additionally, we also have a bi-weekly “sprint” planning meeting, to discuss what we’re going to develop during the upcoming two week iteration. Finally, we hold a fortnightly “retrospective” meeting to go over lessons learned from the previous sprint period.
One of the benefits of adopting Scrum is that at these meetings, everybody involved in the development team is invited and encouraged to contribute or have their say. As you can imagine, however, this process can sometimes get quite noisy, drawn-out and occasionally irrelevant if the conversation does not involve your particular area of expertise – especially if someone’s feeling particularly chatty or descriptive.
So in order to keep these meetings to a reasonable length of time, and to concentrate on just the planning issues and the bare facts, we here at Soulmates have introduced a new tool to help us focus: a baseball cap.
Our thoughts were that if any one of the participants at the meeting starts to deviate away from the subject, repeat themselves or get a little carried away with their topic, the “Scrum master” presents them with the baseball cap to wear – the idea being to “cap” the conversation at source! This indicates that the person presented with the cap is now prohibited to speak until asked to contribute again, or until the cap is passed to someone else during the course of the meeting.
Being a fanatical supporter of St Helens Rugby League, I came up with the novel idea to replace the baseball cap with a scrum cap (see what we did there?). I contacted the Saints RLFC to see if they would be kind enough to ask any of the players to donate a scrum cap to us, which they kindly agreed to – as seen above on our Scrum whiteboard.
We’d like to say a huge thank you to Gordon at the Saints community for sorting this for us. I’d like think it was the super Jonny Lomax that donated the cap… but whoever it was, thank you and please know that it will be put to good use.