Scrum Puzzle #2

Wow, I’m overwhelmed by the great response to the first Scrum Puzzle. I loved some of your responses. I especially liked Matthew’s example of moving the boulders. That’s a great way to teach the principle.

Here is my solution:

There are 2 key learning points in this puzzle. Number one is the value of small batch sizes. There are numerous exercises to demonstrate this. Check out the penny game as an example. Most of you got that the stories really need to be broken down smaller. This is often difficult for new teams, but there are techniques you can use to do this. See my previous post on breaking down user stories. If we don’t have small batch sizes, then it takes longer to complete work, progress is less transparent, feedback cycles are longer. All of these are things we are trying to avoid in Scrum, so any solution which makes the batch size larger is generally not a good idea.