Scrum anti patterns More to unlearn than learn

1. SCRUM
Anti-Patterns
More to Unlearn than
Learn

2. Agile Consultant
Anuj M Ojha
A Certified Agile practitioner and transformation consultant who helps organizations deliver value to customers and businesses,
through team coaching and mentoring, effective collaboration, facilitation and continuous improvement practices
Certifications
Experience
13+ years of experience with relevant agile experience of
11+ years and have trained 12000+ participants &
coached 125+ teams on agile practices & implementation
techniques. Have been to various geographies to deliver
consulting services.
My special area of interest has been bringing in business
agility, appropriate mindset & enriching Culture. It all
starts from no process to some process which helps teams
& companies in being their own better version by healing
their broken processes and other aspects.
Educational Experience_
• Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Science
Areas of Expertise
Business Agility, Agile Coaching (Leadership,
Business Stakeholders, Product Owners, Scrum
Masters, Development Team members, Agile in
Distributed Teams & at Scale, Agile Engineering
Practices (Pair Programming, TDD, BDD, ATDD & CI)
Organisations I have worked with_
ServiceNow, McKinsey, Verifone, Honeywell, Fidelity,
SAP Labs, Sourcebits, Dell, Dell EMC, Nets Norway,
Maersk, NEC Technologies, Tesco, Reliance JIO,
Reliance ADA, Ericsson, Orange, L&T Infotech,
Gemalto and many more.

3. © Benzne. All rights reserved
3
About Us
Stability is a flux “Lotus is a an extension of that same concept
of equilibrium, of beauty amidst chaos, it is
self regenerating, self existent, continuously
reproduced from its own matrix, each petal
opening is progressive unfolding of our path to
end state, negotiating the murky, muddy
waters to realise ones own potential.”
“Benzne aims to enable organizations and
individuals in their journey to constantly
innovate and reinvent themself, to help them
be agile, open, looking forward to accept
change, continuously evolving and yet be in
equilibrium, to somehow be in a state of
constant flux and yet be stable, much like a
Benzene ring.”

4. I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
- Bruce Lee

5. Topics to cover Starting with.. Q&A Done!
About Agile
Scrum Master
Product Owner
Event specific
Artifacts
Learning board

6. Year Incidence Who’s Who?
80 years ago IIDD - Iterative and
Incremental Design and
Development
Developed by Dr. W. Edwards Deming
Early adopters : DoD, NASA, US Airforce
Late 1940s Lean & Kanban Founded by Toyota & Kanban is articulated in software development environment
by David J. Anderson in 2005 with other colleagues
Lean s/w development by Mary & Tom Poppendieck
1976 Time for movement in agile Tom Gilb argued evolutionary development of adaptive development iterations that
provided rapid results & more frequently visible benefits. Mentioned in his book
Software Metrics
1980s-90s • Spiral Model
• Rapid prototyping,
• RAD (Rapid App.
Development),
• RUP (Rational Unified
Process)
Developed in response to traditional methods like Structured Systems Analysis and
Design Method and other Waterfall models
Spiral Model developed by - Barry Boehm
RAD developed by – James Martin
RUP developed by – Rational S/w Corp.
1995 Scrum (formally introduced) Initial idea by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka
Formally introduced by – Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland & others
1996 XP – Extreme Programming Developed by Kent Beck at Chrysler corp.
1997 FDD – Feature Driven
Development
Developed by Jeff De Luca at United Overseas Bank, Singapore
2001 Agile Manifesto 17 developers met to develop 4 essential values & 12 principles

7. Ref: Agile Alliance subway map

8. Potentially Shippable
Product
Increment
Review
No Changes
in Duration or Goal
Retrospective
Team
Daily Scrum
Meeting
Product Owner
Input from End-Users,
Customers, Team and
Other Stakeholders
Product
Backlog
Refinement
Scrum Master
SCRUM FRAMEWORK
Product Backlog
Sprint
Backlog
Sprint
1-4 Weeks
8
9
10
11
12
7
1
2
3
4
5
6
The Scrum Team
Sprint Planning
Meeting
Team Selects
How Much To
Commit To
By Sprint’s End
7
1
2
3
4
5
6

9. Topics to cover Starting with.. Q&A Done!
About Agile
Scrum Master
Product Owner
Event specific
Artifacts
Learning board

10. Scrum Master
Master of Scrum
I know the truth. I don’t
know what is the
problem but the answer
is Scrum I know.. The
certifications I have
done & ‘good english’ I
speak
Clerk Master
Only good with booking
meetings, writing MoMs
and you won’t miss the
Alarm clock
I am the POWER.
Make me a temple
Superior than all.
Manipulates all to win the
conversation & curtained
with fakely supreme Agile
knowledge
My powerful
friends
Socialise with people to
get in their good notes.
Biased & power hungry.
Only Facilitator
With lack of problem
solving skills and no
eagerness to learn, you
end up doing just
facilitation
Anti Waterfall
For any justification, they
will blame waterfall, other
models and frameworks.
My line gets bigger when I
demean the other lines

11. Scrum Master
Aggressive
Lacks patience and
complains often. Gets
anxious easily and a
poor listener
Bigotry
Intolerant towards those
who holds different
opinions (or not follow
the scrum guide as
doctrine)
Self-organizing is
you-care-not-me
Asking team to find
solution by themselves
doesn’t mean they don't
need guidance
Paisa Power Punter
You think that Agile will
help you in getting
promotion, good money
but not-convinced Agile
works and see it as a
fashion to adopt.
Only I solve the
problem
Actually Not. You help
team in getting their
problems solved. And will
approach others to also
get the team’s problem
solved
Das Experiment
Misunderstanding of role
and power impacts
project success & team’s
moral

12. Topics to cover Starting with.. Q&A Done!
About Agile
Scrum Master
Product Owner
Event specific
Artifacts
Learning board

13. Product Owner
Product Owner
What?
Without understanding
the trait you find yourself
lost in this new role and
just surviving with
instructions of scrum
master and coach.
Actually Not an
Owner
You are busy enough to
be available, You don’t
understand
requirements well from
stakeholder
I talk & you write
stories
Treats Development team
as assistants. While both
PO & Dev Team together
understands the
requirements as team
exercise & then PO
updates the backlog
Over-confident PO
Couldn’t handle the
frequent changes &
hence causes change in
sprint scope, incomplete
stories and add to
confusion
Abhimanyu
Knows how to write
stories or talk about
requirements but don’t
know how to accept or
validate the stories
Translator
Only passes the words of
client but do not do any
prelim research to
identify value

14. Product Owner
I talk only about
BUSINESS VALUE
Technical or Solution
Architects should be
best friend of PO who
can help them along
with Development team
to vet the requirements
and justify them
‘Work’ is what I
understand
It is often tough to
explain the technical
debt, spike, engineering
practices like
refactoring, TDD and
others which are
important
Mr./Mz Executive
Don’t know how to test
the product. Don’t know
how to present to
customers. Too classy to
be approached
Lacks Vision
Don’t understand the
concept of themes,
epics, incremental
outcome and also
prioritization
Micro-work Owner
PO can’t interfere in sprint
backlog and the tasks
assigned to individuals
Busy Bee
Not reachable

15. Topics to cover Starting with.. Q&A Done!
About Agile
Scrum Master
Product Owner
Event specific
Artifacts
Learning board

16. Sprint Planning
‘sprint’ over Value creation
Many teams have forgotten why
they have started sprinting? Was
it a scam or intent?
Blindly believing velocity &
capacity
Team should vet their
commitment by presenting the
way they will accomplish sprint
goals
Over-committing
Many scrum teams rarely achieve
what they commit. Somewhere
we need to add slack time
Leads assigns the work
Leads are expected to probe over
solving the problems and also
assigning to development team
Ignoring the Inputs of SPM
There are 4 inputs: Product
backlog, retrospective, Review
feedbacks, past performance
Work = Only stories
Technical debt, refactoring,
technical tasks and so many
other things are needed which
may not impact client directly
PO come unprepared & at times
absent
Development team end up
assuming requirements

17. Daily scrum
Jira tickets over sprint goals
“Yesterday I was doing the work
on this ticket, today I will work on
this ticket & tomorrow……”
SM decides who talks next
SM usually becomes TaskMaster
and ‘controls’ standup meeting
First thing in day
Intent is to meet each other once
in every 24 hours at the time
which is convinient to all
development team members
In meeting rooms
Availability of meeting rooms are
always a challenge. It should
happen in open area & possibly
near Dev team location
Daily Status Update Report Meeting
All reports to Scrum Master &
look at him/ her and Scrum
Master finds pleasure in such
gesture
I am always Genius
Be it anyone who speak, the
GENIUS always interrupts and let
you know that YOU MISSED THIS
‘It starts when we all show up!’
No, it starts when it is supposed
to start at the fixed time. It’s our
responsibility to show-up on time
& come prepared
Silo Not Team
My tasks, My problems, My
dependencies and its all
about me..

18. Backlog Refinement
Anything but Grooming
We get lost in our loops of
technical discussion and
confused unprepared PO
Dumping Zone
PO sends the requirement to
the team and let team struggle
to find the gibberish
requirements
Scrum Guide Slaves - No grooming
Refinement is a necessity
where the feedbacks, new
learnings and other changes
could be discussed
Task level estimations
Grooming is just to create
awareness and check our
confidence. Or we found any
risk or dependency
Accidental Meeting
Its booked in advance. PO need
to come prepared for this event
and shouldn’t make it as an
accidental meeting
Mini Review
Refinements are at times used
for checking the interim
progress of sprint which is not
right

19. Sprint Review
Washing dirty laundry in front of all
The chain is strong as its
weakest link. Complaining
about your teammates not
good
Selfish Credit Eaters
“When it's good, it's due to ME
and the bad is always by
THEM”
QA gives the demo
Anyone in team can give the
demo including PO also
Coming unprepared
We should ensure the review
experience must be awesome.
Invitees confirmed, infra
checked & did dry-run
Defending, Selling, Promising
None should happen. Intent is
to explore the increment &
cater feedbacks to fail or
succeed faster
Out Of Scope, OOS, OOS ..
Though the feedback is out of
scope but we need to focus on
PROBING
PPT over Product
It needs to be functional
walkthrough to get feedback
from experience not to
showcase our ppt skills

20. Sprint Retrospective
Blame Game
We should focus on process
improvement over pointing
fingers
No Retro or 15 min Retro
Retro helps us in inspecting our
process and we need to sit over
issues to find the ways to solve
Sorry! Its private
It’s only scrum team who
participates. Strictly on invite.
Talkers Talk
Not opening up anyone will not
help us in identifying the areas
of improvement. One should
speak their opinion
Only Problems
Collect the problem. Discuss.
Vote. Find ways to improve.
Psychological Safety
The little birds whispers private
chats to outsiders to get the
attention

21. Topics to cover Starting with.. Q&A Done!
About Agile
Scrum Master
Product Owner
Event specific
Artifacts
Learning board

22. Product Backlog (PB), Sprint Backlog (SB),
Product Increment
Backlog contains only STORIES
Backlog contains work items
which could be of any type
Velocity over Increment
Development team members are
judged over velocity achieved.
Product is paralysed with
technical debt & poor quality
No Documentation
Agile said working software
over comprehensive
documentation
Agile = Ignorance is Bliss
In the name of agile, we avoid
doing homework, change sprint
backlog
Sprint Voodoo
Finishing the stories/ tasks
over creating an evolving
integrated Increment
Fixed S|C|T but AGILE
Fix two out of the three - Scope,
Cost & Time. Mostly, negotiate
on Scope

23. Burndown chart
Dream come true!

24. When one door closes, another door opens
…
When one anti-pattern is resolved then another gets
opened.. Be conscious

25. Topics to cover Starting with.. Q&A Done!
About Agile
Scrum Master
Product Owner
Event specific
Artifacts
Burndown Chart
Learning board

26. THANK YOU
www.Benzne.com
Anuj M Ojha