Fabio de Andrade

Fabio Andrade

I worked in a team of 5 Scrum Masters, and had some teams of 4 to 6 members. Most of the time they were remote teams, but the members were able to gather in one place for the ceremonies.

As Scrum Master I facilitated the Daily, Planning, Review and Retrospective, as well as guiding the Product Owners in fulfilling their role in the process. In the beginning, teams were not mature enough to provide estimates of activities. So we adopted planning poker:
1- During planning, we chose an activity that everyone had a sense of complexity
2- Each member scored the activity and justified his grade
3- Generally we would do one more round of estimation
4- After that, the activities prioritized by the PO were estimated based on the complexity of the Guide activity

Unfortunately sometimes the PO could not participate in Planning, but we tried to refine the stories and keep the backlog up to date. And then I as Scrum Master presented the stories of the next sprint.

The Daily was held by remote teams by call in a virtual room, and I tried to participate in all of them. At first, it lasted more than 30 minutes, as the team got into technical issues during the meeting. But I got them to understand that it harmed the team as a whole, and then any technical problem came to be talked about after the Daily, involving only directly affected members.

In Review, the team presented the deliverable product to PO (sometimes it was the client himself) and collecting feedback from him. In the role of Scrum Master, sometimes I needed to interfere in the meeting because the PO acted as if it were the team's boss, so I explained his role always supporting Scrum.
Usually we took advantage of the fact that they were all together to understand the next stories.

In Retrospectives, the team raised facts that degrade development performance. Sometimes some members pointed to other members as guilty of some problems. I facilitated the meeting by focusing on the process and tools we use to run the sprints.