Anti-Pattern

During the product development, some people often seek for the perfect solution. “How do you ensure the UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) is unique so the system won’t crash?” A developer asked me recently during a discussion on a RESTful API. “We have to fine-tune the UX,” said a developer from another product team, “I don’t feel comfortable delivering this UI to the users.” He then spent plenty of time explaining his imagination to build the perfect UI. ...

Several years ago, I participated as an observer in a Sprint Retrospective of a team. The Scrum Master facilitated the event with beautiful drawings to encourage active participation from the attendees. The Sprint Retrospective ran smoothly. They gathered the data, generated insights and decided what to do. In the subsequent Sprint Retrospective, the Scrum Master introduced a Mario Kart theme as part of the facilitation process. The event, again, ran smoothly. The Scrum Master reviewed that facilitation was successful and decided to keep applying the fun elements during the Sprint Retrospective. However, when I revisited the team several months later, the team barely kept the “fun” style, and the attendees were not energetic anymore. ...

In 2020, the Scrum Guide changed “Scrum Roles” to “Scrum Accountabilities”. This implies that a member of a Scrum Team is not tied to a role. A Scrum Team member takes accountability to work towards the same Product Goal. It also implies that a single member may take multiple Scrum Accountabilities. But is it recommended? Despite the influential people at Scrum.org not recommending us to take multiple Scrum Accountabilities, I had no choice but to take all three accountabilities since my team’s establishment. The team works quite smoothly most of the time, but there are unnoticed risks. ...

More teams within my company have been adopting the Scrum framework to enhance their product development process. Occasionally, I have the opportunity to engage in conversations with the developers and Scrum Masters from these teams. Among the various comments and discussions about Scrum, the most common issue raised is the abundance of lengthy meetings. Their managers complain that their teams are spending more time in meetings since implementing Scrum. However, is this issue truly caused by Scrum? When I presented my team’s weekly calendar to them, they were astonished by its brevity and simplicity. ...