Company Policies and The Team's Design Choices

Our company is becoming more and more corporate day by day. Ironically as it becomes more corporate, it tries to adopt more agile methodologies.

One of the company's director is an expert in databases. Some teams in the company regarded him as a data architect. Eventually he was officially appointed as the data architect few months ago. We were asked to consult with him for any database schema design or other database related issues.

The data architect then took it upon himself to standardize solutions across various teams. He came up with a database schema design for a feature and proclaimed that every similar feature should use the same schema. Everybody, albeit reluctantly, agreed with his schema design. Now when a similar feature needs to built as part of the sprint, the developer who was reluctant (let's call him "A') in accepting the architect's schema design has to face the data architect again.

'A' rebelled and came up with a simpler easier domain specific schema design instead of the architect's generic schema design. He emailed the design to the team on the mailing list. A team member (let's call him 'B') spotted the inconsistency and asked the developer to reuse the architect's schema. This attracted manager's attention and the manager too asked 'A' to get the data architect's approval.

A meeting was setup to discuss the design with the architect. As expected, the architect and the manager opposed the idea of deviating from the standard, already agreed upon design. 'A' is very unhappy as he will have to now code a complicated solution.

This incident raises many questions. Should the scrum master intervene? He did not and he should not. Design is the team's responsibility and the scrum master should completely leave it up to the team.

What is the manager's role? Should he be involved? This is the grey area. In an ideal scenario, the manager should let the team figure out the design. But in large corporations, they often have policies and procedures which cannot be thrown away because one team is implementing scrum.

What should the team do? Other team members should talk to the unhappy developer and try to comfort him so that his productivity is not affected.

Day 2, Sprint 2 - User Story Granularity

We are in sprint 2 of a project. People are debating about the granularity of user stories. Last sprint user stories were very easy - e.g. come up with database design. Such issues did not require any coordination between the team members.

In this sprint we have chosen stories with multiple components. People are getting anxious as they will have to now depend on other people to finish their work. There is coordination involved. For example schema design has to finish before the web application functionality or service layer can be built. If schema design task of the same story is chosen by developer A and web application functionality is chosen by developer B, developer B has to co-ordinate with developer A. Developer B cannot start before developer A finishes his work. To avoid this, developer B comes up with cool idea of splitting the story into two stories - database design and web application functionality where database design can be scheduled in this sprint and web application functionality can be built in next sprint. Developer B calls it as a Common Sense Approach.
This common sense approach does not make sense because of following reasons:

1. Scrum emphasizes on self managing teams. It is very important that the team learns how to manage itself and how to collaborate with each other.
2. The use cases or user stories are supposed to be written more in use case manner. They must be business oriented. The stories must not be engineering driven, but strictly business driven. The stories in sprint 1 were not written correctly. They should have been written more in business manner.
3. First schema design, then serially building functionality of web application sounds more waterfally. Using agile processes schema design and building web application functionality should be doable in the same iteration.
   

Scrum Master called a meeting to explain why we cannot have stories like "Come up with schema design". He drew the following diagram :

He explained to the team that Scrum encourages to build a narrow piece of end to end functionality instead of artifacts such as schema design so that it can generate maximum business value. This also facilitates the feedback loop thereby giving product managers a chance to refine ideas on the product. People seemed to be convinced.