My first hack-day

I’m alphabetically metamorphosing with one hour sprints

First week jitters

Participating in my first hack-day in my first week as a Scrum Master recently took me outside of my comfort zone. Luckily for me, was our “fail fast” mantra (Sainsbury’s are passionate about taking forward this Agile and Lean principle) so if I tripped up at least I had a valuable learning experience. No one juggles faultlessly first time, right?

Expanding from mile deep and inch wide

Elsewhere, Sainsbury’s Digital & Technology division are keen to turn “I” shaped colleagues, those with a single deep vertical of knowledge, into “T” shaped, which means to add a broader knowledge that’s further reaching but not so in-depth. Over time other deep verticals of knowledge are cultivated and culminates in a colleague achieving “M” shaped status. Whilst typing I am doing the YMCA dance in my mind.

I’ve been T-shaped for years, with marketing, technology and design skills under my belt. At Sainsbury’s I’ve worked mainly as an i-shaped Product Owner, so relished the chance to show-n-shine my t-shape with the objective, eventually I will be m-shaped. Getting experience and training as a Scrum Master will give me another vertical to morph into the desired m-shape. Look at me, I’m metamorphosing!

England score another goal

My new team (Identity, who are all about the multi-mission log-in experience, headed up by Product Owner, John Santamaria) have had a few leavers and starters so the hack-day was an opportunity to gel as a team and tackle the issue of a problematic GoCD pipeline that caused delays. The idea was to have a safe space to learn how to create a working Jenkins instance using Ansible and populate with pipelines and for the developers to take on each other’s tasks, so they were all working cross-functionally.

Two Pizza team

Because it was a hack-day instead of a hack-a-thon, we only had from 9:30am to 5pm in a conference room kindly made available to us by Daemon Solutions. It had fantastic air-con right in the middle of our heatwave, good wifi, loads of whiteboard space and a huge flat screen; they also laid out some lovely treats for us too, which helped fill the gap the pizza didn’t fill. I’ll be writing about the famous pizza sized scrum team too, which is a blog for another day.

Talking through the logistics of the hack-day with the team was a cohesive experience. We knew we had to have a couple of hours’ prep’ earlier in the week. Talking and chalking, we draw out the pipeline and story-walled features and functionality. Before we went into the hack-day we had our epics and high-level tasks and would be setting up an environment so that we could get cracking on adding value as soon as the hack started.

One hour sprints

Someone suggested doing one hour sprints in our prep’ session which was a stroke of genius. I seem to have been getting credit for this brainwave, but here’s my confession: it wasn’t me. In our prep’ we collectively agreed the framework for the day:

· Problem to solve

· Set Hack-day & sprint goals

· Illustrated in sprint planning (as a picture speaks a thousand words)

· 1 hour sprints

· 10 minute retros

· Retro-estimate story points to start with

The hack-day started with bringing up our story-wall and tasks on the big screen, then copying the first sprint’s tasks onto the white-wall and having slept on them for a couple of nights the team saw there was a few more tasks to add. Initials were penned next to the tasks the devs were taking on and I started the hour’s countdown.

Retrospectives

Full disclosure (I’m such an open book) I did grapple with my first retro. I thought I’d go with the sailing ship one with things that slowed down the sprint on the anchor and great aspects in the sails etc. but one of the team (the ever-helpful Paul Harman) suggested a confidence chart retro — he must get sea sick — but thanks for showing me that one. I also took a happiness score over each sprint (1 being rotten and 5 being happy days): the first ranked 4.5/5 so a great start (but did go on to slide, just a little). Before each of the following sprints I looked up various retro methods. Two truths and a lie, was the best of the day, as getting your new team to lie and guessing which is which was great fun for all of us.

I figured I got two months’ experience as a scrum master in one hack-day with one hour sprints. The team got really short feedback loops as well and, as I suspected, we had to pivot halfway through the day. At the end of the first couple of sprints, I asked the team to retro-size the sprint. It became apparent three points for the hour was comfortable, eight was too large and the third sprint had been pre-sized at another unachievable eight. Something had to give. Hack-days/-a-thons have only two rules: build whatever you want as long as it adds value and you have to have something shippable to demonstrate at the end. So, we de-scoped and went from the ambitious five pipelines to two — which we smashed. *High five*

Summary

In conclusion: we had 1 hack-day, 1 problem to solve and 1 goal which gave us 5 outcomes: learned more, gelled as a team, deployed pipelines using Ansible and Jenkins, got a very short feedback loop and free pizza. So, that equation shows we are greater than the sum of our parts!

Thanks to the Identity team for making me so welcome — you’re all awesome!