Devops for Growth

InfoQ interviewed Ritika Singh about the heart of agile, using Shu-Ha-Ri and Kokoro to achieve the mastery of being agile, and to adapt to the pace of the market and competitive change.

InfoQ: How can we use the heart of agile from Alistair Cockburn to map out daily agile activities?

Ritika Singh: Heart of agile talks about an agile culture by simplifying it into four stages – Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect and Improve and if we look into daily agile activities, they all revolve around these four imperatives.

If we dive deep into agile activities all we are trying to achieve is more collaboration within and between teams starting with the daily stand-ups, refinements, and sprint planning which helps teams to collaborate with all the required stakeholders, making it fast and simple for teams to deliver. This is then followed by retrospectives which give teams and organizations a chance to reflect and eventually improve on things for them to perform better. So, overall the heart of agile very well depicts the agile activities.

To help provide current and aspiring Agile professionals with additional information and guides for Scrum, we have compiled a list of member-written articles from a wide variety of experts. We have articles that cover a wide range of topics to help you learn everything you need to know.

Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum, leased these concepts to describe the three states of Scrum Mastery and its progression. He rightly identified the same stages a Scrum Masters must pass through to achieve a deeper master of the practice.

Let’s walk through a simple explanation of how it applies to Scrum Masters.
Shu

In the Shu state, the Scrum Master is the master of the process, of the Scrum framework. She is good at going through motions: setting up and facilitating events, helping her team achieve a stable state, helping the team find its velocity, and guiding continuous improvement through the process of retrospective. In this state, the focus is more on how to achieve something without worrying too much about underlying theories of practice.
Ha

When the Scrum Master and her team achieve the Ha state, they are doing more than executing steps to follow a prescribed way of working. According to Jeff Sutherland, the team can “get software done at the end of the Sprint and has a good Product owner with a ready backlog at the beginning of the Sprint, has data that clearly show at least a doubling of productivity, and has strong management support.”
Ri

At this stage, a Scrum Master can step back and let the team, a well-functioning and productive organism, perform at their best. The Scrum Master is never in the spotlight and is never a puppeteer. The Scrum Master instinctively and seamlessly adapts to the environment and team needs as frequently as needed.

These three words are (according to Ward's wiki) roughly translated as "hold", "break", and "leave."

• shu - In first learnings, a student strictly follows the instructor, replicating each move as precisely as possible. Per the late Takamura, "the student must first resign himself and his ego to a seemingly random series of repetitious exercises." Kata at this level (known as shoden) are specifically designed to get students to focus on basic movements. Some shoden are even designed to create "physical discomfort," in order to reinforce the student's need to master focus. Ultimately, the goal of shu is to ingrain basic moves in the student, so that they do not think twice when it comes time to apply them. Wax on, wax off. Or, "Red, green, refactor."

• ha - At this secondary level, the instructor begins to grant the student some leeway to experiment and diverge from strict application (but not to the point where the kata no longer resemble the originals). The goal is to open the students' minds to begin to recognize the true usefulness of the thing being mastered. The ha level is where we expect to start seeing light bulbs click on in peoples' heads. After practicing strict TDD for a while, students start to see some of the power of being able to move their code bits around. They learn when they can not test something because it "could not possibly break." Letting students diverge also allows them to note the value in things like consistent test naming, taking smaller steps, or exploring more sophisticated forms like BDD.

• ri - At the ri level, the student no longer views the rules as constrictions, but instead as having been the stepping stones to learning and freedom. In fact, the student no longer thinks about rules. He or she has ingrained a set of techniques that can be applied at a moment's notice, but has also learned to specialize that knowledge with additional experience-based elements. In some cases, this level may find the master abandoning Red-Green-Refactor to even greater success, for short periods of time. Don't try this before you're a master!

Durant ces dernières années l’Agile a connu un grand essor et le rôle de « Coach Agile » devient de plus en plus répandu. Beaucoup de personnes dans les entreprises sont séduites par les valeurs que porte l’Agile et prennent le rôle de « Coach Agile ». Petit à petit les personnes réalisent que ce rôle, certes gratifiant, est assez dur à cerner et à maîtriser.

Afin de vous aider à avancer dans ce rôle, voici quelques pièges classiques à éviter et des propositions de solutions