Scrum Challenge - QA Nickname Generator

Sometimes we have scrum challenges that are more about fun than learning a specific lesson.  For my team, i often think that they feel that the scrum challenges are mostly about fun.  This is ok for a few reasons.  

Firstly, not all lessons you learn are consciously learned.  If i can build a situation that provides a learning experience, either by understanding their own actions and reactions or by observing the actions of their the peers then there will be lessons learned, whether the team realizes it or not.  most of our learning is experiential and not known until you start to apply the knowledge.  Or heck, most people may never consciously understand much of the knowledge that they've gained.  That's the fun part about experiential learning.  Your experiences guide who you become to the point where you don't question it and just be.  Now, to be a more complete, balanced happy individual i believe that you should be self-aware enough to understand these things but that's not a very easy target to reach. 

Secondly, any challenge that engages your brain or even just your involvement is good exercise for you on many levels.   Getting the old brain juices moving from a direction different from normal is powerful and useful tool to keep you brilliant.  

Thirdly, fun challenges without learning are still exceptionally good team building exercises, or can be.  Having interaction with healthy laughter and people working as a team builds the bond that help foster useful communication as well as the tolerance buffer for requests for help and against annoying habits. 

A couple of weeks ago i came up with the idea that QA should have it's very own nickname generator.  If you're not familiar with the concept it's been a pretty prevalent internet meme as long as there's been internet (or so it seems).  It's a set of rules, or an app that allows you to determine what your nickname would be, pursuant to any particular theme without having to do work on your own.  Just googling 'define nickname generator' brings back links to produce a nickname themed on; hobbits, smurfs, pirates, gangsta, real <sic> japanese name, chinese name, wu-tang name, stripper, jedi, and etc.  So with all those options, why not a QA nickname generator?  

As with most weird thoughts i have, i try to figure out how to roll it up into a scrum challenge.  Thereby alleviating my need to be creative that week and giving the team something fun and/or educational to work on.  Giving it some thought i decided that what the scrum challenge would be is the team itself would come up with how the nickname generator would actually work.  I went in with the potential seed idea of using a thesaurus and types of testing and we went into a free-form brainstorming session.  

Below is what we arrived at:


The QA Nickname Generator

The Rules

1. Alpha position of the first letter of your last name = Y 
1. ie a = 1, b = 2, c = 3
2. If your Y is already represented in the team, Y = Y+N
3. repeat 2 as necessary
2. Number of letters in your first name = N
3. Pick your favourite testing type (ie regression, functional, smoke...etc)
4. Put the testing type into a thesaurus (thesaurus.com for example) and your core nickname is the Nth choice in the list of synonyms.
1. If the list is shorter than N, wrap in counting through the list.
5. Count 'Y' positions through the hero type list and that's your hero nickname.
6. Your nickname is FirstName 'the core nickname hero nickname' LastName
1. you can swap the core and hero if it makes more sense.
2. you can modify the core and/or hero words slightly as long as they remain the same root, to make them sound more appropriate.

The Hero Type List

Position	Hero Type
​1	​   Kung Fu
​2	​   Sword Master
​3	​ Cyborg
​4	​   Singer
​5	​Guru
​6	​Gunfighter
​7	​Zombie Lord
​8	​Sleeping Beauty
​9	​Dwarf
​10	​Dinosaur Tamer
​11	​Were Lion
​12	​Bear Puncher
​13	​Communist

The Results

So my nickname came out to be  Mike 'the courageous sleeping beauty' Hrycyk  which is pretty awesome. 

some other examples; (with the people's names trimmed for their privacy)
'the drinking sword master'
'the soot bear puncher'
'the zombie lord verdict'
'the mechanization guru'
'the industrialization singer'
'the substantiation bear puncher'
'the constancy communist'
'the ​administration cyborg'
‘the Kung-Fu Operative’


Reception
We haven't really done a brainstorming session per se looking for an actual targeted end product before in scrum challenge.  we've done brainstorming but the end target isn't defined at all - ie One Uppers.  There was a bit of confusion and scrambling at the start but in the end, with a bit of prodding and guidance we came up with a useful and viable product.  Fast enough that we are able to use the tool to figure out 4 or 5 nicknames in the challenge.  which gave us some fun conclusions.  

We do these challenges in a meeting room every friday and there's a manager scrum and then a development team scrum in the room following our scrum.  Every friday members from both teams have taken to looking to the whiteboard to see what our scrum challenge has produced.  often there are things and when they aren't they turn to me in askance.  I've even had a manager or two take some of my scrum challenges and do them with their team, on occasion.  This challenge was the first time that i had random team members from groups go through the challenge on their own and send out the results.  So that was cool. 

What Went Right

• good end product. 
• team worked together to produce ideas. 
• had time to actually produce some nicknames. 
• the team enjoyed the challenge quite a bit. 

What Went Wrong

• some of the team was left out of the collaborative nicknaming process although we followed up later with the entire list.  

Lessons Learned
Brainstorming isn't easy.  You need a path to really guide people along to have an end product that you can use.  i struggled working on this challenge to produce a brainstorming session that i thought would be useful.  in the end i had to provide a pretty healthy seat to the storm.  A large part of this, however, was the length of the challenge, 15 minutes is just very short. 

I want to see your nickname if you make one please - in the comments!

Signing off.... Mike 'the courageous sleeping beauty'

Quality to the rest of the world

A few months ago one of the coordinators for VanQ - the Vancouver QA Users Group approached me and asked if i was interested in giving a talk at one of their monthly meetups.  I don't do a lot of public speaking but i am not stranger to it but one of the reasons that i started this blog was that i want to give back some of the experience and wisdom that i've gained in my 16 years in this business. 

I wracked my brain for a few days trying to think up topics that might be a little interesting to a crowd of mostly QA's and the one that I kept coming back to time after time was the difference between Quality Assurance the term as we use it in software QA and the term Quality Assurance as the rest of the world uses it.  After all, it was coming to the job i currently have that really opened my eyes to the breadth that quality has in the world. 

Before offering it up to the coordinator as my topic, i floated it it to my team to see if they'd be interested in such a topic.  I didn't get a lot of feedback but the feedback i did receive was, centered around the fact that the topic got regular observance in VanQ discussions.  i was saddened by this response a little so i found another topic that i could talk about that was a little more standardized in the software QA realm and floated them both past the coordinator as options.  He indicated he was excited by both of them and would love if i'd present both but would like the one Quality in the wider world one first as he thought it would be well received by the VanQ crowd. 

It was an interesting process for me, putting together the slide deck for this presentation.  In the past i have, of course, done numerous professional presentations within my workplace.  But for those you almost always have the target audience well sorted while you're producing the materials.  They're a known commodity because you know the people.  The other types of presentations I've done have been roasts of colleagues for going away parties, birthdays, retirements etc.  For those i've also known the people i was talking to and could rely on a series of prop "gifts" and materials that i knew would hold some sort of relevance to the audience.  For this it was a lot more like going in cold.  i didn't know what they would find funny or interesting. 

The first preparatory step i had available to me is going to see a couple of VanQ presentations from other presenters.  Luckily it was still a couple of months out and there were two presentations i could go to.  That was excellent for me because the presenters were people just like me.  Not super polished professional presenters but people with some experience who wanted to share it with others. 

I showed up at my talk fairly nervous but not afraid, something they tried to make worse by telling me that they were going to record my talk, the first one they'd ever done.

All things considered it went pretty well.  People laughed when i wanted them to laugh and didn't when i didn't want them to.  The message was proven to be on point when a person from a similar field but much closer tied to the material validated the things i was saying during questions.  There were some things that i learned;what to do with my hands, to repeat questions from the audience when only i'm mic'd, to rehearse a little better and not to rely on being able to see the laptop screen for the presentation unless i know i'm going to be able to. 

The coordinator told me that i was very good for the crowd, making the generally dry presentations a lot more amusing and accessible.  He asked if i'd come back and i said yes.  Who said growth, personal and professional isn't good for you?

Here's the recording...

Scrum Challenges - QA Drawerings - Blue Submarine

QA Drawerings

The collaborative game problem solving game of drawing.

The Rules:

1. The judge will draw on the white board an image.  This image will represent a starting point for the team.
2. The judge will then provide to the team a problem that they have to solve.
3. Once the problem has been revealed there will be no further talking until the challenge is over.
4. One at a time the team will approach the whiteboard and draw either a single straight line of any length or a single circle of any diameter.
5. They will then hand the pen to the next person in line and they will do the same.
6. This continues for a set period of time, usually about 2 minutes before end of scrum so there's a bit of time to discuss the solutions.

1. Judging the solution:
1. There is no set solution for the problem.  Thinking out of the box is highly encouraged.
2. There does not need to be only one solution, in fact it is more common, with the complete lack of communication, to have multiple partial and/or complete solutions.
3. The solutions has to include a means for the solution to happen.  ie - if the problem is hanging picture and someone draws a nail in the wall, how did the nail get there?  is there a hammer, a hammerer etc.
4. This is meant to be fun, so there is no real way to 'win' or 'lose'

QA Drawerings - Blue Submarine

The Hint

Often the team will ask on Thursday for a hint for Friday's Scrum Challenge.  I will produce very dastardly vague hints.  On occasion these have caused email speculation wars amongst the team on Thursday and even sometimes research to help them do better in the challenge. 

While the hints are kind of evil and super vague they are always groaned at or at least understand as to how they relate to the actual challenge the next day.  They have yet to figure things out from a hint though. 

The hint for this one actually stemmed from a joke someone made in scrum after somebody asked for a hint.  Someone else joked that the hint would probably be something like, 'blue.'  I took this as a challenge and produced a scrum challenge to match. 

The Problem

Paint my green submarine blue

Starting Picture

and the Finished Drawering

In the end they built a bubble around the submarine that they were going to fill up via a trough, tube and a truck.  Although there was also a blue cannon being arranged. 

Reception
Team drawerings are amazingly fun for the facilitator and relatively fun for the team.  They enjoy the speed of the activity and the creativity of drawing.  You can feel their need to cooperate on the solution and you can feel their frustration at their inability to communicate as part of that need.

What Went Right
This challenge is just one giant ball of learning for everyone.  

What Went Wrong
It's really difficult to stop the team from talking and communicating.  You have to police this well.  Also, they hate being constrained by the one line or one curve rule.  If.  They.  Could.  Just.  Draw.  One.  More.  Line.  They.  Could.  Solve.  Everything.....So hard. You can feel their frustration. 

Picking the right drawings for this game can be challenging.  Some work, some don't just because of how hard to pick a solution can be.  This one worked all right, as did the changing a lamppost light-bulb one. 

Lessons/Team Benefits
I learn so much about communication every time i see this game played.  So much about the need for design to be a collaborative and communicative approach.  Without someone to harness and direct energy you get multiple solutions.  Without words providing context to discussion you can see one person's solution co-opted and turned around completely before it's their turn again.  The truly successful participant in this game is the person who can be elastic enough in their planning to go with the flow of what happens to their drawing.  

It's a true moment of brilliance when you see a person understand what someone else is going for, if not their entire solution and just helping.  Stick figures happen like this a lot, you might not know what a stick figure will do when it's complete but your whole team might help you draw it to see.  You can also see frustration on people's face when that stick figure is complete and before you can get back to the start of the drawing line, someone else has taken it a completely different way. 

You're helpless to succeed on your own in this challenge.  It never works out that one person goes off and draws their own thing because other people just want to help.  When you start a new tactic for the solution other people will see this and contribute.  however, they may not contribute in a manner that fits your goals.  

This is simply an amazing game to watch and absorb.

Quality is _________? - Scrum Challenge

A few months ago ASQ (the American Society for Quality) sent out an email to its members asking them if they wanted some bumper stickers they were offering to support some ASQ quality anniversary (my apologies, i've forgotten which - probably World Quality Month).  I thought that it was a good offer and asked for 5.  And promptly forgot about them. 

Until last week when when they arrived in the mail.  The bumper stickers are plain, white, say at the top 'Quality is' and have a space to write in the ending to this statement.  They also have an ASQ emblem on the side.

Not wanting to fill them out all by myself and having more than 5 team members i had to get a little creative in figuring out what should be on each sticker.  So i came up with a little game for our Friday scrum challenge.  

The Rules

1. The Team was asked the day before to bring with them to the Scrum Challenge 10 answers to the statement, 'QA Is __________(!)'
1. response could be one word or a phrase up to 10 words.
2. During the scrum all of the responses were handed in to the facilitator.
3. Each participant is given 5 votes.
4. The facilitator reads out the 10 responses for each participant. 
5. After each 10 the facilitator asks each person if they want to vote for any of the responses.
1. if a response is voted for it is written on the whiteboard and the number of votes are indicated beside it.
2. multiple responses can be chosen, they get added to the whiteboard and tallied.
3. participants are responsible for remembering their votes and not to use more than 5.
6. Scoring
1. The top five responses by vote will end up on a bumper sticker.
2. Each vote for a response will give that person a point.
3. Each response that is duplicated will give each participant a point.
1. In the case of a duplicate, both participants score the votes.
4. The highest scoring participant will win a prize. 

Here are the responses that got votes - in order of votes

1. Quality is Never an Accident
2. Quality is Above Quantity
3. ​Quality is What Developers BELIEVE They Deliver
4. Quality is A Creative Process
5. ​Quality is Achievable
6. Quality is Pricey /Costly
7. Quality is Not a Finishing Move in Mortal Kombat
8. Quality is Defined by the Customer
9. Quality is a Song by Paul Simon
10. ​Quality is One of the Best Words Starting with Q. 
11. Quality is Everyone's Responsibility

and here are the actual winners in order - most votes at the top.  (oh, the 5th one was a write in vote by the facilitator - ie me)

We have not yet figured just where we are going to put the bumper stickers.

Reception
This game was well received by the team.  Some very healthy debate was had during the reading out of the selections that people had made.  Whether quality really was accidental or creative and some good team camaraderie was had discussing what developers really believe quality to be.  The discussion was lively enough that i had to stop it in order to get through the reading of everyone's submissions.  We picked the discussion up again in a lunch & learn meeting that we have biweekly and it took up most of the hour. 

What Went Right

• Excellent discussions about what quality really is.  

The team enjoyed the challenge quite a bit. 

What Went Wrong

• Timing was a little tight for the number of submissions. 

Lessons Learned
There's a lot of passion in QA's about quality.  There's also some wiggle room about what the word really means.  There still isn't true agreement about whether or not Quality is Never an Accident - a division that my wife and i also hold.  For the record, i think that it is never an accident.  In any product you build no matter what the circumstances of the moment of creation are, the tools that you use in creating have already had quality discussions as part of their makeup. 

Scrum Challenge - QA One Uppers - Sofa

A few months ago i came up with a new scrum challenge i've been calling 'One Uppers.'  This one has been a big hit with the team.

One Uppers - Travis Sofa

Instructions

1. Start with a random person assigned by Judge.
2. That person has 10 seconds to come up with a response to this game's challenge.
3. The next person around the circle then has to come up with a response that in some way one ups the first person's answer.
1. one upping can mean anything that is bigger, better, more extreme, more interesting, more dangerous, more complex.
2. use your imagination.
3. things can be additive.  for example if i'm going to have a glass of water, then you might have a glass of water with ice.
4. additive can continue almost endlessly but it is not a requirement. 
1. ie a glass of water with ice and a straw.  a glass of water with ice, a straw and a salted rim.  but then the next one could be an ice cream cone.
5. the judge can rule against any one up and the person has 10 more seconds to either convince mike he's wrong (next to impossible) or come up with a new response.
4. This repeats around the circle, the one upping becoming larger and larger.
5. If a person can't come up with something that the judge likes within 10 seconds the buzzer sounds and that counts as a strike.
6. After 3 strikes or 10 minutes the game is over.
7. The number of one ups is counted and the score entered into the annals.  

Here's an example of one of these that we did recently. 

Travis, one of our co-ops was leaving to go back to school.  School being in Victoria, across the straight from Vancouver.  

The Question:

How Travis can get his girlfriend's sofa back to victoria?

The One Ups:

1. Carry it herself.
2. Help her carry it.
3. Use a dolly with flat wheels.
4. Use a trailer.
5. Use a horse with the trailer.
6. Tell Paul about the kitten shortage in Victoria - he'll tow it with his bike to get there.  (Paul fosters kittens for adoption)
7. Use 2 horses and Paul.
8. Harness Paul's kittens too.
9. Swap in a tractor for all livestock.
10. swap in a RUSSIAN tractor.
11. Swap in DM riding a Russian Bear for tractor.
12. Add Pontoons to the Bear to help it swim.
13. Add 2 canoes under the couch to aid in floating.
14. Add trained sharks chasing the DM/Bear combo.
15. Add salmon racing ahead of the bear to have something to chase.
16. Add cookies in salmon's mouths to encourage DM to motivate bear and paddle himself.
17. Add a helicopter with a tow rope for DM to hold.
18. MONSTER TRUCKS!!!!
    
    

Reception
The team has really enjoyed the one ups.  as the team wins or loses as a team (the goal is to get the most one-ups on the board in 10 minutes) it's very collaborative.  Suggestions are often shouted out but people are able to go their own way as well.  It's pretty rare that someone has to default on their choice.

What Went Right
This challenge went very well right from the start.  Team was quite willing to work together towards a goal.

What Went Wrong
It can be second nature to jump to an extreme right away cause that's more 'fun.'  In the introduction i cautioned against that because if you go to extreme too fast it's going to become harder and longer to come up with the next list item.  The end goal, after all, is the longest list, not the most extreme ending.

Lessons/Team Benefits
This game provides really good interactive, collaborative activity time.  It's always very good-natured and you can feel the team gelling together as they work through the 'problem.'   You can also feel the team using team dynamics and peer pressure when people make choices that make the game harder.  A good example was the very first list item on the very first play of the game.  The question was 'how do you stay cool on this hot summer day,' and the first response given was 'go to a waterslide.'  the team vocally rebelled against that individual and forced him to alter his entry to 'drink a glass of water.'   it worked out far better in the end and go to a waterslide was eventually used.  I'm a big fan of using team dynamics and peer pressure to encourage better team behaviour.   One of the most powerful things for QA in running agile teams is the ability of QA to gently mock a developer for making the same mistake repeatedly.

As it is a timed event it also provides exercise in thinking fast and problem solving.  Given that things get silly and you never know what the person before you is going to say you have to respond quickly with an intelligent response.  It also provides a very good exercise in thinking outside of the box.  There is no box for the way these one uppers generally go.

We've played 3 times now and it has yet to get old.

Absence Makes the Mind Wander - and White Lies Scrum Challenge

So i've only been slightly here for the past few months.  My life has been concentrating mostly on our new baby and making sure that work doesn't get left in the dust.  Things seem to be settling out a bit, as my daughter hits her 8th month and we get more used to things, maybe i'll be able to find some more time.

i think that one commitment that i can make is to be more regular about posting our friday scrum challenge details for ya all.

i think that i've mentioned it before.  my QA team meets for 15 minutes every day and has a pretty traditional scrum, what you've accomplished yesterday, what you're going to accomplish today and what blockers you're challenged with.  On fridays though, i take over the scrum and administer a 'Scrum Challenge.'  These are mostly team building games, questions, challenges etc.

Today's Challenge

White Lies

Instructions

During Scrum

1. Each person is handed a piece of paper.  (they've been told to bring pens)
2. Each person has 2 minutes to write down three statements about themselves and their name on a piece of paper.
1. the statements can be things like their shoe size, their birth place etc.
2. one of the statements will be a lie.
3. that statement should be marked as a lie.
3. The judge reads out each person's statements anonymously, randomizing statement order for each person.
1. going around the table each person votes on who wrote the three statements.
1. the judge records the people that get it write, anonymously.
2. a person voting for their own entry gets that point.
2. going around the table again, each person votes on which statement is a lie.
1. the judge records tallies against each statement.
2. a person voting on their own lie doesn't get counted.
4. At the end the judge tallies up the scores.
1. one point for each person's vote for the right person.  ie if Joe has 3 people pick his entry, that's 3 points for joe.
2. one point for each person's vote for the right lie.  ie if Joe has 3 people choose the statement that was actually a lie that's 3 points for Joe,
5. Winner is the entry with the fewest points. 

An example of an entry

Joe

1. More a dog person than a cat person.
2. I have 4 nieces.
3. I traveled to the D-Day beaches. (lie) 

 Reception
This game was received by the team quite well. It took a minute or two extra to explain and it challenged a couple of people achieving it but they enjoyed all of the parts.  Two team members indicated later independently of one another that they had really enjoyed this game.  I don't normally receive that kind of post-game validation so i'm taking that as a very good sign.

What Went Right

• The team understood the challenge and were able to play.  They were able to vote for one another. 
• The team enjoyed the challenge quite a bit. 

What Went Wrong

• Eight players meant that we were a little stretched for time.  we didn't get to do the scoring in the game together. public scoring is part of the learning and not having time for that is a miss.  i feel that we would have time for it if we play the game again because the learning curve will not eat up time and voting will be smoother. 
• Didn't think to have the players mark which entry was a lie.  had to followup afterwards.  i've already corrected this in the rules above. 

Lessons Learned
As with all of the games that we play, i want there to be something that people can take away from it.  Predominantly this game brought with it the concept of getting to know your other team members.  There is the obvious, of course, of learning about your fellow team members both from their true statements and their lies.  But there is also the depth of getting to know your team mates through the way that they approach untruths.  There are hidden queues there about nervousness of lying, how clumsy the lies are, etc.

This game also brought with it some game theory.  A couple of the people chose items that they believed others would think was someone else in the group.  They also chose lies that they thought would misdirect.  This wasn't really all that successful through intent that i saw (although some very good accidental misdirection occurred) but you could tell that they were trying.

We will play this game again.

It's the little efficiencies that get you good

Wow, it's been a while since i posted.   I won't make excuses...other than that since the last time I did post the wife and i have been dealing with the birth and first weeks of our new child.   Ok, i guess i will make one excuse.

Today was reading this article about Kaizen implemented adhoc in the real world and it made me realize that I have in fact been lazy my entire life.  Ok, to be fair, I could be called a lazy person by a lot of people and I wouldn't really have any defense against them.  I do appreciate my time on the sofa a little too much, it is true.  But this is not the lazy to which I am referring, or in a way perhaps I am.

I have never believed for any task that there wouldn't be a better way to build the mousetrap.  I have expended hours and hours in my life on more interesting make-work projects to somehow convert the original task to a more palatable, easy, comfortable or convenient effort.  I can't actually support a claim that throughout my life that I have have necessarily saved a lot of time/money/effort but i can at least claim that i have tried.  I don't think that i've ever tried to put forth that this desire to find the easier, more efficient, sometimes better way wasn't driven primary by lazy but hey, we all have our own motivators don't we?

Lazy is a term that kind of has more negative connotations than it needs to have in our society.  Lazy might mean that you do a shoddy job because you're too lazy to do it right, it might also mean that you never get your butt off the couch to do the job at all.  But lazy might also mean that you require yourself to have an appropriate end result but that you get there through a path that is smarter, easier, better.

When you think of lazy that way, Kaizen is lazy being good for business.  For this type of lazy is generally good for business.  Finding a shorter path to the same result almost always saves time, effort, manpower and obviously money.   At the personal level what kaizen, as i'm now choosing to call my lazy pursuit of better, does for me is two fold.  In the initial attempt at the task i am more interested and involved because finding the better way is in and of itself additional challenge.  But in future iterations of the task, it's an easier task to accomplish and therefore more likely to be done properly. Not to mention, any change in process from the first iteration will obviously need tweaking through the future attempts.

Kaizen, my lifelong friend, you provide justification for my laziness and for now that's ok.