This presentation discusses if feedback is always a positive thing and how it can become a burden for development lifecycle. Feedback tidal wave is an often practice in modern software development, and we try to position it correctly and give tips and practices how to tackle it, before our developers drown in it.

1. How to save developers from
drowning in Scrum
or “Is feedback always welcome?”
HOTEL EUROPE, October 21st
Kenan Halilović
Bosnia Agile

3. Feedback

4. Why is feedback important?
● Agile Manifesto values
○ Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
○ Working software over comprehensive documentation
○ Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
○ Responding to change over following a plan

5. How feedback works?
Scrum (focus on developers):
● Sprint Planning
● Daily Scrum
● Sprint Review
● Sprint Retrospective

6. Tidal wave

7. How tide works?

8. The consequences of tide
● Organisms independent of tidal change
● Organisms living in the intertidal zone
● Organisms dependent on high-tide

10. Feedback tidal wave

11. A feedback tidal wave
● Is feedback always good?
○ Studies show it’s not*
● The consequences
○ Stess and feeling of beeing overwhelmed
○ Unhappiness of Development Team
○ Loss of focus
○ Loss of time
○ Result: poor performance
*“Is timely information always better? The effect of feedback frequency on decision making”
Nicholas H. Lurie, Jayashankar M. Swaminathan

12. Ways to tackle it

13. Ways to tackle it
● Organizations
○ Show you care about your development team as well
○ If you are an organization that does Scrum - do Scrum
○ Do not combine Scrum Master and Product Owner roles

14. Ways to tackle it
● Scrum Masters
○ Time boxing is there for reason - enforce it!
○ There are exactly four feedback ceremonies, remember?
○ Obstruction of developer’s time is an impediment - remove it!

15. Ways to tackle it
● Product owners
○ Recognize that your main focus should be value maximization
○ Work toward better user stories
○ Respect ceremonies, other roles and artifacts
○ Communicate with your stakeholders openly
○ Show the value that uninterrupted development brings
○ Show the ratio of productive vs not-so-productive work
○ Protect development team!

16. Ways to tackle it
● Developers
○ Improve your estimates!
○ Do not accept meeting request just because someone sent you one
○ Plan and prioritize your time in a way that you have blocks of uninterrupted work
○ Plan all of your communication
■ Emails
■ Chats

17. What we get out of it?

18. What do we get?

19. That’s all folks!
I wish I had
another
status call

20. THANK YOU!