Scrum Overview

“Scrum” Stands for …Nothing!

• Scrum is not an acronym, it is a term taken from Rugby that refers to a method of restarting a game after an accidental infringement, or when the ball has gone out of play.

The Standard Scrum Process

• There is no standardized process in Scrum.

• Scrum is a framework for organizing and managing work.

• Scrum is the leading contender in the pantheon of certified Agile software development methodologies.

• The flip side is that an organization’s “unique practices and special approaches” can pollute the Scrum process.

The Scrum Practices

Scrum is: “a refreshingly simple, people-centric framework based on the values of honesty, openness, courage, respect, focus, trust, empowerment, and collaboration.”

• There are Four Dimensions to Scrum:
  • The roles of those who participate.
  • The activities in which a team will participate.
  • The artifacts created to manage the process.
  • The rules that bind the interactions of the roles, activities, and artifacts.

Scrum Roles

There are three roles in Scrum.

• The Product Owner

  • Provides leadership needed to define the product.
  • Decides which features and functionality to build and in which order to build them.
  • Responsible for overall success of the software.
  • They must be available at all times for any questions from the dev. team.

• The Scrum Master

  • Helps the team understand and embrace the Scrum values and principles.
  • Provides process leadership.
  • Maintains productivity, and helps to remove roadblocks.
  • Acts as a leader, not a manager.
• The Development Team
  • Typically ranges from five to ten people per development team.
  • Large companies will have multiple pods of these dev teams.

Scrum Activities & Scrum Artifacts

Activites of a Scrum Team are simple to list and cycle over and over again.

1. Product owner has a vision of what needs to be created.

2. They take the vision and break it down into a list of features to add to a backlog.

3. Product owner manages the backlog through a process called grooming that leaves the list in a prioritized order.

4. Dev process begins with Spring Planning, where the team forecasts how many features they will be able to complete in a set amount of time.

5. daily scrum is an adaptive planning activity where team members help coordinate their work through am inspection & synchronization.

6. Sprint is completed with two introspection and adaptation activities: show and tell and sprint retrospective.

The Product Backlog

While in maintenance mode of an on-going project, the backlog will include:

• New Features
• Changes to Existing Features
• Bugs
• Fixes to Technical Debt
• Etc.

Sprints

• Sprints can be for up to a month.
• The work completed after every spring should create something of tangible value.
• Sprints are always timeboxed so they always have a fixed start and end date.
• New sprints will always follow the completion of an old sprint.

Sprint Planning

• Goal is to agree on what the upcoming sprint is supposed to achieve.
• Agree on a sustainable pace.
• Sprint Backlog : Second backlog that includes breakdown of tasks for targeted features and associated backlogs.

Running the Sprint

• Daily Scrum
  • Daily Scrum/Daily Stand-Up : 15 min. meeting held in the am where each team member answers three questions:
    • What did I accomplish yesterday?
    • What do I hope to accomplish today?
    • What obstacles or impediments prevent me from making progress?

Done

• Sprint results should be “shippable” meaning the team needs to define what their definition of “done” is.

Show and Tell

• Opportunity to see what everyone on the team has created.
• The most important part is the conversation that ensues after presentation.
• Successful review results in information flowing in both directions.
• It is a scheduled opportunity to inspect and adapt the product.

Sprint Retrospective

• Time taken to dicuss what is not working with all of the development practices.

Then it all repeats!

Sprint Details