Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing product development.
Scrum (software development) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Agile software development describes a set of principles for software development under which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing cross-functional teams.
Agile software development – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Getting started with scrum in a classroom (or any collaborative setting) requires only sticky notes and markers. Add masking tape if you want to tape off grids on the wall. With these you can make a scrum task board.
Scrum boards are sticky notes arranged on a grid. Tables are powerful, and masking tape is a cheap, portable table maker. You don’t have to stick with scrum techniques to get value out of the notion of sticky notes advancing across a grid. The technique is handy and adaptable.
Some teachers in our community have been experimenting with task/story boards for years, spinning the simple notion of marching sticky notes into custom classroom management tools. Agile and scrum might feel familiar to PMLD (Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities) teachers accustomed to the flow of child observations leading to next steps, photos / videos, and construction of boards, like a living planning folder. Sticky notes are transferred into learning journeys. It’s all very non-linear and in the moment, which makes it more effective and humane, more agile and responsive to our spiky profiles.
With their focus on autonomy, constructionism, and experiential learning, agile and scrum are good fits for progressive education. They are good fits for our philosophy of “teams, technology, and help“.
The most successful human beings aren’t good at everything, they’re good at one or two things and they scale those strengths.
How do they mitigate those weaknesses? They mitigate those weaknesses the way we all do, with teams, technology, and support.
The Gift: LD/ADHD Reframed
This scene from Silicon Valley humorously conveys the gist of the scrum task board (NSFW, depending on your work, due to colorful language).
And this walks step-by-step through the process of making and using a masking tape and sticky note scrum task board.
The rhythms of a scrum board come across in this time-lapse video.
Don’t get hung up on a particular implementation of scrum. The agile principles of self-organizing teams, agency, communication, and feedback loops are more important than a particular framework or variant. Start simple, be attuned to the culture of your teams, and iterate process.
Scrum cultures often do daily “stand-ups” or “huddles”. Some cultures do one or two hour long huddles, while other cultures do brief stand-ups/huddles because synchronous meetings have their morbidities. No matter the length of a standup or huddle, the idea is to share daily and maintain alignment.
Distributed teams do their huddles online, typically in a chat channel or group video hangout, using online rather than physical scrum boards. The synchronous nature of meetings isn’t a good fit for distributed teams spanning multiple time zones. Globally distributed teams thrive on and require asynchronous communication.
Meetings are notoriously synchronous. There’s usually not one daily standup meeting that everyone attends in such environments. Distributed teams have their own communication cultures that adapt meetings to asynchronous collaboration. In a classroom, the synchronous nature of meetings isn’t a problem. You’re in the same room several days a week.
Culture is important. Scrum and agile do best in open by default, “communication is oxygen” cultures informed with the hacker ethos of flexible improvisation and continuous iteration.
In this 2 part video series, Spotify discusses their agile engineering culture and their history with scrum. This is a good primer on agile and loosely-coupled, tightly-aligned, autonomous teams.
We use agile and scrum techniques and philosophy at our learning space. Stimpunks Learning Space offers community and space for passion-based, human-centered learning with purpose. Our learners collaborate on distributed, multiage, cross-disciplinary teams with a neurodiverse array of creatives doing work that impacts community.
We adopt a hacker mindset of flexible improvisation and experiential learning and a social model mindset of inclusion, acceptance, and belonging.
We combine these mindsets with the tools and techniques of agile to communicate, collaborate, iterate, and launch as teams. When we use technology to collaborate in default-to-open cultures, we create serendipity and solve the problems of real life.
The resources below outline the philosophy and principles of agile, scrum, and self-organizing teams. Some, such as the eduScrum guide, adapt scrum to classrooms.
Adapting, working in groups, are those, in the end, the two necessary elements required to work in the digital world in general?
Xavier Niel explains 42: the coding university without teachers, books, or tuition | VentureBeat | Entrepreneur | by Arthur Scheuer, Ulyces.co
Agile Principles
Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
Principles behind the Agile Manifesto
Modern agile methods are defined by four guiding principles:
Modern Agile
- Make people awesome
- Make safety a prerequisite
- Experiment and learn rapidly
- Deliver value continuously
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
eduScrum Guide
An eduScrum Team consists of a teacher (Product Owner) and Student Teams of four students. One of the four students of a Team fills the role of (Student Team) eduScrum Master. Student Teams are self-organizing and multi-disciplinary. Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team (e.g. teachers). Multi-disciplinary teams have all competencies needed to accomplish the work. The students form themselves into Student Teams based on skills and personal qualities. Although the team is responsible for its own results and is in that sense independent, they may use insights and information of other teams. Cross-team cooperation is encouraged. The team model in eduScrum is designed for optimal autonomy, collaboration, flexibility, creativity, motivation and productivity.
eduScrum Teams deliver learning results iteratively and incrementally, maximizing opportunities for feedback and adjustment. Incremental deliveries of “Done” learning results ensure that a potentially good result towards the learning goals is always achievable.
The eduScrum Guide
Student Teams have the following characteristics:
The eduScrum Guide
- They are self-organizing. Nobody (not even the Product Owner) tells the Student Team how they should realize the learning goals.
- They are multi-disciplinary, with all required skills and personal development themes to be able to achieve the learning goals together and can develop personally.
- Student Team members can have specific skills or focus areas, but the responsibility lies with the Student Team as a whole,
- The Student Team members may determine themselves if they want to contribute their qualities, or that they want to develop new areas.
- The Student Team tracks its own progress and quality level based on the acceptance criteria and the Definition of Done.
Agile Classrooms
To build 21st Century learning from the ground up, we look to see how companies like Google, Spotify, and GE build their innovative cultures. Their secret to innovation? Agile. Where focused teams unleash creativity, adapt through fast learning cycles, and iterate towards success. Agile Classrooms is a cross-pollination of Agile with modern learning and motivation research. With Agile Classrooms, 21st Century readiness is built in.
Agile Classrooms
Agile Classrooms self-organizes its own learning, uses visual accountability structures, and are immersed in reflective feedback. It is a structured learning environment that restores the freedom to teach and learn. Where students reclaim responsibility for their own learning and teachers shift into facilitators and coaches.
Agile Classrooms
Scrum
The Scrum framework in 30 seconds
What is Scrum? An Agile Framework for Completing Complex Projects – Scrum Alliance
- A product owner creates a prioritized wish list called a product backlog.
- During sprint planning, the team pulls a small chunk from the top of that wish list, a sprint backlog, and decides how to implement those pieces.
- The team has a certain amount of time — a sprint (usually two to four weeks) — to complete its work, but it meets each day to assess its progress (daily Scrum).
- Along the way, the ScrumMaster keeps the team focused on its goal.
- At the end of the sprint, the work should be potentially shippable: ready to hand to a customer, put on a store shelf, or show to a stakeholder.
- The sprint ends with a sprint review and retrospective.
- As the next sprint begins, the team chooses another chunk of the product backlog and begins working again.
Scrum teams constantly respond to change so that the best possible outcome can be achieved. Scrum can be described as a framework of feedback loops, allowing the team to constantly inspect and adapt so the product delivers maximum value.
Scrum Values | Agile Manifesto | Scrum Principles – Scrum Alliance
All work performed in Scrum needs a set of values as the foundation for the team’s processes and interactions. And by embracing these five values, the team makes them even more instrumental to its health and success.
Focus
Because we focus on only a few things at a time, we work well together and produce excellent work. We deliver valuable items sooner.
Courage
Because we work as a team, we feel supported and have more resources at our disposal. This gives us the courage to undertake greater challenges.
Openness
As we work together, we express how we’re doing, what’s in our way, and our concerns so they can be addressed.
Commitment
Because we have great control over our own destiny, we are more committed to success.
Respect
As we work together, sharing successes and failures, we come to respect each other and to help each other become worthy of respect.
Scrum Values | Agile Manifesto | Scrum Principles – Scrum Alliance
Self-Organizing Teams and Cultural Agility
Cultural agility requires:
- Collaboration alongside task commitment
- Sharing learnings along with individual empowerment
- Working with consensus toward a common goal via personal autonomy
- Continuous improvement with failures but also repetitive success
- Ensuring trust among team members through supportive leadership
- Value delivery above functional work elements
- Adherence to processes, but with flexibility and process tailoring
Each system is impacted by its environment continuously; change is constant. For an environment to be productive, it must support production. The essential purpose of any designed environment-in which a productive system operates-is to facilitate production regardless of change. By nurturing self-organization, this becomes possible. Only through self-organization can the means of productivity quickly react and adapt to change.
Tips to accommodate self-organization:
Self-Organization Within Digital Agency Teams – Axelerant
- Focus on providing a non-autocratic leadership to encourage self-organization
- Focus more on mentor and mentoree empowerment to encourage self-organization
- Make sure that employees embrace change as an opportunity to innovate
- See customers as team members and allow clients to add freely to backlogs
- Empower digital agency teams to readily adapt to priority changes.
Scrum is a feedback-driven empirical approach which is, like all empirical process control, underpinned by the three pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
Scrum (software development) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Agile in Education
Your Journey From…
Prescriptive → Iterative
Visible cycles of learning.
Making intentions explicit and visible fosters partnerships and allows for a meaningful and relevant education to emerge.
Content → Culture
Learning starts with why … it’s the big story.
The real lessons of life are embedded in experience.
Evaluation → Visible Feedback & Reflection
Nurturing the love of lifelong learning.
Partnering in a learning journey catalyzes continuous growth and ownership.
Control → Trust
Valuing the freedom of discovery.
Providing space for human diversity increases agency and self-direction.
Competition → Collaboration
The power of shared learning.
Sharing the individual perspective develops the social intelligence necessary for solving problems, communicating effectively, and deepening understanding.
AgileInEducation.org – Agile In Education
Takeaways for Educators
“Sprint” and daily “stand up” meetings allow a diverse team of software engineers – including members of the team who may be off site – to develop simple to complex products in relatively short periods of time. Their approach offers a model for educators when it comes to increasing team effectiveness, especially the following seven takeaways:
1. Share daily.
2. Own outcomes.
3. Expect obstacles.
4. Focus on the problem.
5. Prize feedback.
6. Keep learning.
7. Value Diversity.
Cracking The Code To Teams: What Educators Can Learn From Programmers | EdSurge News
Teams, Collaboration, and Psychological Safety
Yet many of today’s most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving individual workers — a practice known as ‘‘employee performance optimization’’ — isn’t enough. As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of modern work is more and more team-based. One study, published in The Harvard Business Review last month, found that ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’ over the last two decades and that, at many companies, more than three-quarters of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues.
In Silicon Valley, software engineers are encouraged to work together, in part because studies show that groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems. Studies also show that people working in teams tend to achieve better results and report higher job satisfaction. In a 2015 study, executives said that profitability increases when workers are persuaded to collaborate more. Within companies and conglomerates, as well as in government agencies and schools, teams are now the fundamental unit of organization. If a company wants to outstrip its competitors, it needs to influence not only how people work but also how they work together.
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – The New York Times
As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – The New York Times
Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – The New York Times
In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – The New York Times
Within psychology, researchers sometimes colloquially refer to traits like ‘‘conversational turn-taking’’ and ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ as aspects of what’s known as psychological safety — a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – The New York Times
Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – The New York Times
The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond. And those human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else. In fact, they sometimes matter more.
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – The New York Times
For Project Aristotle, research on psychological safety pointed to particular norms that are vital to success. There were other behaviors that seemed important as well — like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – The New York Times
Google, in other words, in its race to build the perfect team, has perhaps unintentionally demonstrated the usefulness of imperfection and done what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better and in more productive ways.
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team – The New York Times
Collaborative Education
We’re doing something that works quite well: We rely on cooperation. People talk a lot about Collaborative Economics nowadays. Well, here at 42, we chose Collaborative Education. What does it means? It means putting people together and making them learn together. The knowledge, you can acquire it from the internet. You can type anything into Google, and there’s your answer. So lessons are useless, you’ll find the best lectures in the world on the internet, if you want to learn. But we do not wish to make them learn stuff by heart, we want to teach them how to develop, work, and live together, to build projects together and to make them happen. That’s what we want to teach them.
Xavier Niel explains 42: the coding university without teachers, books, or tuition | VentureBeat | Entrepreneur | by Arthur Scheuer, Ulyces.co
Traditional vs. Creative Culture
If you want to build a culture of creation, don’t be the left column.
| Authoritative Leader | Creative Leader |
|---|---|
| Symbol of Authority | Symbol of Inspiration |
| More Sticks | More Carrots |
| Hierarchical | Networked |
| Linear Path | Nonlinear Path |
| Plan and Execute: Launching with 1.0 | Iterate and Do: Living in Beta |
| Sustaining Order | Taking Risks |
| Yes or No (clear) | Maybe (comfort with ambiguity) |
| Literal in Tone | Metaphorical in Tone |
| Concerned with Being Right | Concerned with Being Real |
| Think like a General or Conductor | Think like an Artist or Designer |
| Delegates Actions | Hands-On Driven |
| Closed System | Open System |
| One-Way | Interactive |
| Close the Ranks | Permeable |
| Follows the Manual | Improvises when Appropriate |
| Loves to Avoid Mistakes | Loves to Learn from Mistakes |
| Reliability | Validity |
| Orchestra Model | Jazz Ensemble |
| Community in Harmony | Community in Conversation |
| Wants to be Right | Hopes to be Right |
| Open to Limited Feedback | Open to Unlimited Critique |
| Your Opinion Matters | What are You Really Thinking? |
The traditional leader wants to be right. The creative leader hopes to be right.
John Maeda
Better yet, grow competency networks instead of leaders.
Grow competency networks and catalysts rather than leadership and leaders – to get things done and distribute decision making to where the knowledge resides
The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations
Further Reading
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