Scrum Mastery

by Geoff Watts

T-shaped doesn’t just have to refer to skills though. Scrum teams are expected to do whatever is required of them to deliver within a sprint. This often means people need to act outside of their job description and take responsibility for tasks that they are not technically responsible for, or necessarily highly skilled at. The Geckos are a good example of a team that needed a more T-shaped mindset. The Geckos were coming towards the end of the sprint (day 28 of 30) and were holding their daily scrum. The team were standing around the sprint backlog board and were taking it in turns to update the rest of the team on what they had been working on and their plan for the day. An extract from the conversation follows: “Guy & I have finished coding the photo upload feature and have handed it over to Roxie and Eve to test,” Christian said. “We’re now done for this sprint so we are probably going to make a start on the ratings feature from the product backlog to give ourselves a bit of a headstart for the next sprint. Obviously we have no impediments because we’re finished! Hooray!” Christian then threw the speaker’s ball to Roxie to indicate that he wished to hear from her next, so Roxie took her turn: “It’s probably going to take us the last two days of the sprint to test. We were hoping for a handoff yesterday, but we ended up kind of hanging around a little yesterday waiting for Christian and Guy to finish. Now we have the feature ready for testing, we can get cracking on it....