Jacqueline our lead developer, just informed the team that she was blocked on a story during the team’s daily scrum meeting. Jacqueline said, I have been blocked since yesterday after lunch break, tried to resolve it on my own but no luck. I decided to wait till this morning to inform you guys.
The team seems not to be bothered with her issue.
This is an issue from my observation, as the team Scrum Master and facilitator, I waited for the 16th minute while the team remains focused and started with refreshing their knowledge on what a blocker is and removing it.
A blocker is anything that stops the team from delivering a product e.g. environment unavailable. Blockers should be raised immediately if it cannot be resolved as most blockers are hard to resolve on its own. We should ask for help from other team members (Product Owner, Scrum Master or Dev Team) if we can’t remove the blocker on our own.
Once the blocker is resolved, the team can investigate the cause and have a lessoned learnt to prevent it from happening again. The team also has to be able to differentiate between a blocker and an impediment, because a blocker can actually be an impediment.
In a way, it’s like killing two birds with one stone. Teaching and empowering the team to think about how to remove blockers by themselves thus becoming self-organising.
What is your experience on blockers?
