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I was teaching a CSM course a few months back when a question came up, as one often does, that needed an answer built around the concept of swarming.
An extremely creative example of the swarming concept
Swarming is something that is strangely alien to many folks in software development, so I’ll explain it here. Also, if I don’t explain it here then I won’t have enough to make a good blog post, and we can’t have that, can we?
The idea of swarming is to get the whole scrum team, or as much of the team as possible, to all jump onto a Product Backlog item (PBI) together and get it done in one fell swoop, as quickly and decisively as possible, by working together.
This has the benefit of being fun while at the same time implementing the idea of value-based delivery on the micro level. If a team swarms, it will tend to complete PBIs one after another rather than starting on several PBIs at a time and not completing any of them. So swarming on PBIs in priority order tends to deliver them in priority order while at the same time reducing the number of partially done PBIs (often called Work in Progress and considered to be a Bad Thing) that are hanging around waiting to be finished.
Swarming is something that good scrum teams do.
Side note: Those of you who are constantly asking what to do about the problem of testers not having anything to do until the last two days of the sprint, you should read this post twice. Those of you who are constantly carrying over unfinished PBIs to the next sprint, read this three times.
So, in response to the question, I told the story of swarming to the CSM kids as we sat around the campfire in the training room, eating smores, and they were enraptured. Entranced, really. Lightbulbs were flashing above heads. For some reason, for this class, the idea of swarming really hit home.
We had already discussed the Tuckman model of team dynamics earlier in the course. The Tuckman model, based on observations of lots of teams, simply lays out a four-stage pattern that teams seem to go through as they evolve.
The four stages of the Tuckman model are Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing.
- Forming is fun because everything is new and nothing bad has happened yet. Of course, not a lot gets done during this stage, comparatively speaking.
- Storming is what happens as the team begins to try to get work done and the inevitable power struggles and turf wars begin. It’s not a particularly fun time, but it seems to be something that just happens when people try to work together.
- Norming occurs as the team resolves its internal strife and figures out how to work together.
- Performing is where the team can go when they learn to improve from their Norming plateau into a highly productive, smoothly-operating group of peer professionals.
The phrase “Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing” is familiar to people who have been exposed to the Tuckman model for as little as 2.5 minutes.
So, in a burst of enthusiasm, one of the students in my class (remember the class?) suddenly shouted (well, to be honest, he only said it in a loud voice) “Forming, Storming, Norming, and Swarming!”
Which was great because Swarming is kinda one quick way to describe a Scrum team that is in the Performing phase.
Everybody laughed happily, and I thought, that’s a blog post right there. And look! I was right.
About the Author: Alan Atlas is a Soul Musician, Certified Scrum Trainer, and Agile Coach at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.
