Coaching Agile and Scrum for our new testers was a new challenge for me.

I started with an Introduction to Agile course by defining the general approach which based on iterative development where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams.

I listed the 12 agile principles and the agile manifesto. A brainstorming was made between participants to discuss the link between the manifesto and the different principles.

Then we moved to Scrum as it is one of the most known implementations of agile methodology. where incremental builds are delivered to the customer in every two to four weeks’ time. 

During the session, participants discovered that scrum framework seems easy to manage as it can be summarized in only 3 ‘Roles’, 5 ‘Events’ and 3 ‘Artifacts’.

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Scrum’s Simple Rules

But it’s not evident to deal with all used terminology, they can get confused frequently. Also they can find more words related to scrum and not totally related to the 3-5-3, like ‘Continuous Delivery’, ‘Extreme Programming’, ‘Spike’, …

As my strategy in coaching the reference to games to improve the way they learn.

First Game : 40 Seconds of Scrum

I couldn’t find a better game than the 40 Seconds of Scrum created by Christiaan Verwijs and Barry Overeem to help them learn different terms in scrum and link them to their everyday projects.

We started the game with a lot of groups of two persons each group where every group told one or more story related to Scrum without pronouning the given 5 words. Others are asked to guess what ‘Scrum words’ the main group is presenting.

Noting that the game was time boxed as the name mention ‘40 seconds‘. It means that every story should be described in 40 seconds or less.

  • 40 Seconds of Scrum

I appreciated the interation of all members, they get the occasion to talk about new things and brainstorm about everyday work.

Second Game : Scrum @ Play

Most of participants are new testers, some of them didn’t get the chance to work in a Scrum Team yet, so it’s a good occasion to simulate what scrum is by playing one of the most popular open serious game Scrum @ Play designed by @myagilepartner.

During this game, participants got the chance to discover many Scrum aspects and roles like:

  • Scrum Master
  • Product Owner
  • MVP
  • Epic
  • User Story
  • Story Point
  • Product Backlog
  • User Stories mapping
  • Sprint
  • Sprint Backlog
  • Sprint Review
  • Sprint Retrospective

It was during the first training session of Primatec Academy where all our new members get the chance to learn different modules related to testing and things that they can need in their future projects.

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