Swarming

Another coach and I were coaching an agile transformation in San Ramon in the mid 2010's. We were coaching two teams at the same time.

One team was very open and receptive. That team had been given some schedule leeway.

The other team was not receptive at all. They were under heavy schedule pressure.

We were coaching pairing and swarming. We taught the first team how to break a story down so more than one pair could work on it.

We though it might be a good idea to do a little demonstration for team two on how to break down stories and swarm.

We setup a conference room with four workstations and asked the second team to come in and observe. We were able to switch which workstation was projected onto the screen.

The first step was to have the team do a quick standup and divide the work into four chunks so each pair could do some work.

The rest of the time was us walking the spectators through what was happening. They saw the pairs often get up and walk over to another pair to make sure the pieces would fit together.

We switched the screen based on progress. We showed a pair doing TDD or refactoring code based on a conversation with another pair. Stuff like that.

In the 90 minutes or so, all of the functionality was complete except for the final UI. From a simple UI through the business rules to in and out of the database, this simple story was basically complete.

The second team was not impressed.

The win came the next day during standup when the first team asked if they could work like that all the time.

Happy coaches.