In the last days of this year’s Ramadan, we had a training at office (Grappetite – Feb. 2012 to present). A trainer, Sir Renze J. Klamer, had come all the way from Netherlands and we all had many expectations from the training.
A pre-training evaluation was conducted of all the employees in the company in which we were inquired about ourselves, what expectations we had with this training, and our future goals after it.
Frankly speaking I didn’t expected much in the beginning. But meeting the trainer day after day, my expectations were increased exponentially. The trainer had an overwhelming personality. He had the power to convince people, judge their questions from their faces, and answer them in a way that the questioner is convinced. He had quite experience of scrum training in many countries. Despite being so busy, and moving around the globe every now and then, he had kept a perfect balance between his personal and professional life, which inspired me a lot. The CEO of Grappetite, Gertjan Van Laar is also like him in maintaining pro-personal life balance. I wish I can adopt these qualities of these two wonderful people.
First Day of Training
The day came when the training was about to start. As a matter of fact, I assume that it would be a conventional training in which the trainer would come on the stage, speak about the topics for a couple of minutes, ask questions from the audience, give some assignments and/or reading material and then bu-bye. But to my astonishment, it was completely vice-versa. The trainer started the training with a group activity which was called 3-balls activity. We all participated equally in that and after a couple of minutes we achieved the goal. This activity taught us removing waste (here distance) between team work and increased communication among the group members. Then he asked our questions related to the training in the form of posted notes and he stuck them on the board. He said all these questions will be answered in the last day of training. He then explained about scrum that it is a new framework in which we manage projects in an easy and structured way.
Scrum is actually inspired from Rugby, a game. He explained about the basic features of scrum which were:
- 6 time boxes
- 3 roles
- 2 backlogs
Roles in Scrum
The three roles in scrum are scrum master, product owner and team.
- The scrum master actually facilitates the scrum management imposed in the development.
- The product owner is a part of your own company who represents the client’s demands, expectations and the priorities of work.
- The team is responsible for development, designing and testing; and its size varies with the size and complexity of the project.
Important Scrum Terminologies
The term backlog actually means requirements, tasks or documentation.The two backlogs in scrum framework are Product backlog and Sprint backlog. The product backlog defines all the requirements of the product, making it a super-set; whereas the sprint backlog is the subset of product backlog, which contains the prioritized tasks scheduled to be completed in the following (upcoming) sprint. A sprint in scrum means 2-4 weeks of working in which the team completes all the tasks specified for this sprint. After these theoretical concepts, we were again asked to perform some multitasking activity, which taught us that avoid multitasking as much as possible.
Second Day of Training
The second day of training started with some more detailed insight of the roles in scrum and the backlogs. We also watched some informative videos, and studied in detail the scrum process.
Then the term user stories was introduced by the trainer. He asked us to separate into two teams and then write user stories (or user demands) for a swimming pool. Both the teams performed very well and fortunately the team I belonged to, won the game. The trainer gave every member of the team a unique gift from Netherlands, a wooden shoe key chain. 
The last activity for the day was balloon activity in which the same two teams drew faces on the balloon. But none of the team won. The reason he explained about the failure is that the both teams were focusing to air the balloon and draw the face, but didn’t focus on the user requirement what type of face he wanted.
Last Day of Training
The third and last day of the training was filled with joy and sadness. Because we all were happy to have learnt so many new things, but sad that the training is about to end. The trainer emphasized about the importance of the two sprint plannings (known as Sprint planning I and II). I personally liked the Sprint Retrospective meeting of scrum as it focuses on not only the achievements achieved after the product completion but also on the problems dealt with. He explained some more enhanced features of scrum like the burndown chart and scrum board.
A sprint burndown chart is a graph that shows the defined planned tasks for the entire sprint as the ideal line and the effort remaining on daily basis as the actual line. The target is to achieved the zero point as soon as possible. If the actual line is below the ideal line, the planning is well executed. But if the actual line is above the ideal line, the effort is far behind what was planned.
A scrum board is actually the representation of sprint backlog execution for the sprint. It is used to see all the planned tasks (backlogs) for the sprint, tasks in progress, tasks waiting for review and task completed. The number of columns in the scrum board can increase (detailed) or decrease (brief) according to the organization.
He also gave us tips how can we actually implement scrum and make it successful in the first go. The last activity we performed was the managerial activity which taught us that the manager who is not part of the team doesn’t understand the problems and difficulties of the team members well enough as the team members themselves.
In the last he took out the posted notes, said the question written loud, and to my astonishment, all the questions were already answered during the training, without specifically referring to them. That manifests the quality of the training. We all had the last stand up meeting in which we all thanked the trainer and wished him luck for the future, and yes for introducing us with Scrum. We were also given certificates for successfully completing the training.
Well, that was all about scrum, in my way 😉 You can read more about scrum from its official site scrum.org.
Happy reading..
Information Technology Quest 