Singing Scrum

I got this letter from a guy from Delaware. He works as a developer in a small Scrum team, and his biggest fear was the Daily Scrum.

But not anymore.

Daily Scrum is a short, standing meeting every morning where the team members talk about what they did yesterday and what today’s plan is.

In his own writing he tells why he went to Iron Maiden for help – and then his six year old daughter:

Dear Mr. Cheeky Coder!

I didn’t sleep at all! All I could think about was what to talk about at next morning’s meeting. I work in a small company that creates logistic software for egg distribution. This includes integration with the chickens and the eggs. And some other stuff I do not understand. The code is written in Java. I think. I really do not understand it, but I love the pay. Gotta love the pay.

But when they ask me “what did you do yesterday and what’s your plan for today”, I used to say “well, I polished the egg cracking algorithm and then I created some more unit tests. Gotta have those unit tests!” But this of course got old very soon, as this wasn’t remotely what it said on the yellow PostIt-notes I was handed.

So one morning I started singing …

I get letters like this all the time. Well, maybe not exactly like this one, but the pedal tone in many of them is “people put in jobs they have no clues how to do.”

Some of them figure it out. Not the coding part, but the survival. Like our guy from Delaware:

… I started out with my favourite band, Iron Maiden. ‘Be Quick or Be Dead’ was a great hit one morning. At first they went all quiet, looked at me. But no one complained. The Scrum Master just nodded, said ‘Yea, Scrum is supposed to be agile, nothing is stupid!’ Jenny from accounting told me that ‘Bring Your Daughter… To the Slaughter’ was maybe a little too much this early in the morning. Especially considering I had a little daughter myself. Which gave me an idea …

At this point I wasn’t really thinking it was such a great idea to read on. But I did:

… I use to sing lullabies to my daughter at bedtime every night. So I just repeated those same lullabies the next morning. Good thing they where loaded with coffee. ‘Hush, Little Baby’ – and all silence. They never again asked me if my code compiled. Which it most certainly did not.