Technistas

If you’ve been in the software business long enough, you’ve probably seen just about every methodology. Waterfall, RAD, OOP and Agile, just to name a few, have all been at the forefront of methodology circles, each briefly having its place as ‘the’ methodology, the One Right Way of doing software development. As different as these methods may be, they all have one thing in common: without execution by talented engineers, none are worth the paper they are printed on. Which brings me to the topic of this post. If you’ve settled on one of the agile methodologies and are using scrum to manage your engineering projects, you may encounter more than just a little resistance from engineers when switching to daily stand-ups and burndown charts. Beyond training, there’s one often overlooked practice that can help socialize the idea and practice of scrum inside your team – talking to people.

The daily walkaround that most managers engage in isn’t designed to randomly annoy engineers. Rather, it is one of the most proven methods of management – management by walking around, or MBWA. This simple practice ensures that you and your team members talk face to face, semi-privately at least once a day, partly to get caught up on activities, and partly to socialize new ideas. If the new idea is scrum, you might want to try a variation on MBWA that I call SBWA – Scrum By Walking Around.

The idea is simple. You’ve trained the team, but the daily scrums aren’t going well. People are missing their commitments, and the burndown chart seems to be flaming up like tech stocks in the good old days. Engineers are frustrated, and their frustration is partly directed at you for advocating YAM – Yet Another Methodology. If this is your situation, you need to do a better job of socializing scrum among your team members. There’s no better time to do this than during your daily walkaround.

Try this: plan your walkaround to take place in the hour before the daily scrum. As you visit each engineer, ask them how they feel the new methodology is going, and take lots of mental notes. Then spend a minute reinforcing the key goals of scrum: accountability to commitments, visible progress measures, and short term rigidity combined with long term flexibility. Later, after the scrum is over but before everyone leaves the room, share the concerns that you’ve gathered privately from your walkaround, and get everyone to agree on a plan of action to address the issues. Chances are that there are a few common concerns that everyone has. By getting these out in the open, it signals to the team that you’re responsive to them, and not just another pointy-haired paper-pushing process wonk.