Scrum
Projected Time
Example: 60 - 120 minutes
Prerequisites
Motivation
There is so much to learn and practice every day. Decision fatigue is a matter of fact, so, just why would you add another todo to your already long list of best practices? The reason why is because Scrum is a lightweight and flexible framework based on Agile methodologies that compliment iterative delivery models known as sprints.
Practicing Scrum will enable you and your team to instantly address change requests, and establish a better connection between business and development teams. While this may not be a relevant experience at the moment, once you begin working you may observe that information silos between business and development teams are real. And, using Scrum promotes team morale, to offset the lack of communication, while introducing predictability and transparency when coupled with sprints. Not only that, using scrum will allow you to better predict the success of a project early on.
Which companies use Scrum?
- Below are the companies that use Scrum. You can find the description of each company here.
- 3M: Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.
- IBM
- Google
Objectives
Apprentices will be able to:
- Explain what Scrum is
- Know what a Scrum master is
- Moderate a Scrum session
- Practice Scrum
Scrum Terms to look up and become familiar with-
- Agile Ceremonies
- Agile Manifesto
- Anti-patterns - changing the sprint’s scope after it has already begun.
- Keeping the scope airtight - subscribing adamently to the idea of not adding more to the sprint after the scope has been developed.
- Backlog
- Backlog grooming
- Daily Scrum
- Sprint
- Sprint planning
- Sprint retrospective
- Sprint review - Opportunity for stakeholders to give development team feedback or change requests.
- Stories - Idea of creating a ticket, or notecard for each feature request, technical debt or bug fix.
- Story points - Giving each item a rating of complexity from 1 to 5 to determine time and effort to complete
- Velocity - Measurement to quantify work completed using story points. Velocity gives teams the ability to predict the time to complete two weeks worth of work.
Materials
Lesson
Scrum lexicon
The three main roles in agile development are:
- Product Owner - product champions, focused on understanding business and market requirements and prioritizing workflow for engineering teams.
- Scrum Masters are often confused with project managers. The scrum master plays a coaching role through facilitating, guiding, and unblocking the team. They are outcomes oriented and hold team members accountable.
- Scrum or development team - self organizes around their work and includes 5 - 7 members. Members have different skill sets and together they forecast how much work they will be able to complete during each sprint, using their previous time to complete as a point of reference. They are responsible for planning, design, development, testing, and project delivery.
Common Mistakes / Misconceptions
List things that apprentices might not realize, might assume at first, or should avoid.
- Scrum is a process. This is a myth. Scrum is a framework.
- Scrum is an acronym. This is also false, but a good interview question.
- Scrum is a silver bullet. Scrum is just a framework to be used with a set of instructions. Scrum implementation and the outcome of a project is based on many factors, outside of the control of the framework.
- Scrum means no documentation. Also a myth. Even while using Scrum, documentation is highly encouraged.
- Scrum means micromanagement. Myth. Scrum encourages the team to be empowered and to take on more responsibility when building products.
- Scrum is only about iterative development. While Scrum promotes iterative development, it also promotes team building, culture, and cross-functional collaboration.
- Scrum teams do cowboy coding. Scrum is just a project management style.
- Customers can change requirements at any moment. Myth. When using Scrum, it is best to conduct scrum training with customers.
Check for Understanding
Complete the definitions of the Scrum Terms above by yourself or with a small group.
Supplemental Resources