Episode 17: Bad Smell Bingo

With Tony MIA, Craig and Renee talk about bad smells, geek stuff and daily retrospectives:

Bad Smell Bingo for stand-ups:

Starts late
Not everyone turns up
Not enough of a quorum
Not standing up
Running over 10 minutes (too long)
No focus on roadblocks
Not touching cards
No understanding/association to a story
Talks too long (particular individual)
Not focussing on the three questions (What I did yesterday, What I plan on doing today and roadblocks)
No consistency in the way it is run
Too big
Directed to PM
Directed to IM/Scrum Master
Conversations are not off-lined
Conversations are off-lined too quickly
Risks to delivery not understood
No one volunteers to help
Too short/not meaniful enough
Too boring/monotonous
Run like a progress report
Functionally unrelated teams doing the standup together
Too many people talking at once or no stick
Not talking about actions for retrospectives
People don’t want to be there/been told to turn up

and we missed (bad smells for story walls not included)

Customer never/rarely turns up
PM unpredictably turns up and then asks questions that they could have known if they turned up to previous sessions

How to run a Bad Smell Practice Bingo game yourself:

Get your team into a room. Each person needs a single piece of paper and a pen.
Choose a practice to focus on.
Give everyone 3-4 minutes to brainstorm bad smells associated with this practice.
Randomly choose a person to go first, they read out one item on their list.
If you have the item on your list give it a tick.
Go around clockwise from the first person, each person reads out one of the items on their list. Continue to tick off items on your own list if you have it as it is read out.
If you have 10 ticks yell Bingo!
Profit.

Quotes:

You cannot physically be in two places at once, so why expect to be mentally in two places at once. Limit Work In Progress

— Renee Troughton (@AgileRenee) November 10, 2011