Learn scrum in half an hour

Scrum is a project management methodology guided by 3 principles – transparency, inspection & adaption.

A cross-functional team delivers potentially shippable product increments in an iterative time-boxes called sprints. Inspect & adapt is a major theme in scrum which gives opportunities to improve in the current project itself. The Scrum methodology involves -

A. Scrum Roles

B. Time-boxes

C. Scrum Artifacts

D. Agile Rules

Scrum Roles

1. Scrum Master –

Scrum Master ensures that the team adheres to values, practices and rules of scrum. Scrum Master helps the team to perform it best in an organizational environment by tackling and resolving the impediments on day-to-day basis.

2. Product owner –

Production owner is the only person responsible for managing the product backlog and maintaining its prioritization. The product owner also ensures that product backlog is visible to everyone including the team and other stakeholders.

3. Team –

Team does the work. The team turns the product backlogs into increments of potentially shippable functionality every sprint after sprint.

Time boxes

1. Release Planning –

Release planning answers two question.

I. How a vision can be turned into a winning product in best possible way?

II. How the desired customer satisfaction and ROI can be met or exceed?

Release planning establishes the goal of the release, product backlog, major risks, and the overall feature and functionality that the release will contain. It also establishes the probable delivery date cost if nothing changes.

2. Sprint Planning –

Sprint planning has two parts.

I. What –

Input of this part of meeting is product backlog, the latest increment in the product, the capacity of the team, and past performance of the team. The team decides what functionality should be delivered based in the sprint based of these inputs.

II. How –

Team figures out how to turn the selected product backlog into an incremental “done”.

3. Sprint –

Sprint consists of sprint planning meeting, the development work, sprint review and sprint retrospective. Scrum Master ensures that no change is made that would affect the sprint goal.

Daily Scrum – A 15 minute meeting preferably standup to know –

I. What has been accomplished since last daily scrum meeting?

II. What is the plan for today?

III. What are the impediments?

4. Sprint review –

Sprint review meeting mainly reviews what has been done. Team demonstrates the work that is done and answers the questions. The product owner identifies what has been done and what hasn’t been done. The team discusses what went well and what problems they faced and how did they resolve them. The product owner discusses the product backlog. Sprint review meeting provides valuable input to the subsequent sprint planning meeting.

5. Sprint Retrospective –

Sprint retrospective reviews the last sprint in regards to people, relationship, process and tools like scrum team composition, meeting arrangements, definition of ‘done’, method of communication and processes for turning product backlog items into “done”.

Scrum artifacts

Product backlog, release burndown, sprint backlog and sprint burndown are the scrum artifacts.

1. Product backlog –

The requirement of product that the scrum team is developing are listed in product backlog. Product owner is responsible for creating, maintaining and prioritizing the product backlog.

2. Release burndown –

Release burndown is graphically records the remaining product backlog in terms of user story points or effort across the time.

3. Sprint backlog –

Sprint backlog is the list of the tasks the team commits to complete to turn the product backlog items into a ‘done’ increment. Items in sprint backlog should be decomposed enough to understand the changes in progress in daily scrum.

4. Sprint burndown –

Sprint burndown like release burndown is graphical display of sprint work remaining across the time in a sprint.

Sprint Rules

The 12 agile manifesto principals are the guidelines to make sprint rules.