Scrum

In Previous post, we have discussed about Agile Overview: what is agile, agile manifesto, agile principles and classification of agile methodologies into Light weight approaches and fuller approaches.

Light weight approaches: Scrum, Lean, Kanban, Crystal and Extreme programming (XP)

Fuller Approaches: DSDM (Dynamic systems development method), AUP (Agile unified process) and FDD (Feature driven development)

Let’s discuss about one of the Light weight approaches in this post. Let’s get started with Scrum. Before getting started with scrum just wanted to know whether you believe in statement “None of us is as strong as all of us”. Please continue reading if your answer is ‘YES’ else, read this post twice to realize what wonders can be done if you work in a team.

What is Scrum?

Scrum has become terrifically popular over the past few years due to its simplicity, productivity and broad applicability

First definition of Scrum: Scrum was first defined as "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal" as opposed to a "traditional, sequential approach" in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in the "New New Product Development Game"

According to the Scrum Alliance, “Scrum is an agile framework for completing complex projects. Scrum originally was formalized for software development projects, but works well for any complex, innovative scope of work. The possibilities are endless. The Scrum framework is deceptively simple”

Scrum is a better way of working for teams to work together to develop a product. Product gets developed in small pieces (Called as Product increment in Scrum) and it is delivered as integration to the main product. As team is working on small piece of the product, it gives scope to be more focused (to build exactly and only what is needed), creative and enables better change management

To be more simple and specific, “Scrum is a framework for effective team & customer collaboration to deal with complex projects. It is originally designed for software development work but it can be used to any work if you feel appropriate”

Scrum values

The Agile Manifesto values apply directly to Scrum

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

All activities performed in scrum are based on above agile manifesto and scrum values. Team needs to practice these to achieve effective team work and continuous improvement. The scrum values are Commitment, Courage, Focus, Openness and Respect

Scrum Framework

Scrum framework consist Scrum roles, Scrum Ceremonies/Activities, Scrum Artifacts and Scrum Rules.

Scrum Roles: Scrum Team includes 3 roles

Scrum Master (SM)

Product Owner (PO)

The members of the Development team (DT)

Scrum Ceremonies: 5 activities in the process of scrum which facilitates planning, execution, inspection and adaptation

Product backlog refinement meeting

Sprint Planning Meeting

Daily Scrum Meeting

Sprint Review Meeting

Sprint Retrospective Meeting

Scrum Artifacts: Scrum team has 3 artifacts

Product backlog

Sprint Backlog

Product Increment

Scrum Rules

Before discussing scrum framework one by one, let’s take a look at Scrum framework quickie. After getting to know about scrum, I have seen many pictures explaining scrum. But I felt those pictures are not providing full information about scrum and they are meant for people who have prior knowledge of scrum. Thus made below picture based on my scrum understanding

Scrum Framework Quickie:

ü  In Scrum, work is performed in SPRINTs. Sprint is the basic unit of scrum development.  It is “Time-Boxed” effort i.e. restricted to a specific duration. The duration is decided by the team (normally 1week to 1month)

ü  Sprint is protected with respect to team, Goal and Length. SPRINT Starts with planning meeting and ends with Sprint retrospective meeting

ü  Product owner discusses with customer and comes up with list of high-level requirements (Product Backlog)

ü  Product owner explains requirements to the scrum team, High-level requirements are broken in to smaller features by grooming process and these features are prioritized based on business value (Product Backlog Refinement Meeting)

ü  Before starting the sprint, scrum team meets and selects the tasks to work in next sprint and comes up with a list called Sprint Backlog (Sprint Planning Meeting)

ü  Scrum team starts working on the sprint goal. Team meets daily at specific place & time to synchronize team activities (Daily Scrum meeting)

ü  Scrum team meets with customer to show-case/demo the features they developed (Product Increment) and collects customer feedback (Sprint Review Meeting)

ü  Scrum team meets to inspect self and search for improvements on anything and everything related to team (Sprint Retrospective Meeting)

ü  Sprint Closure…Plan for next sprint

Hope you got a fair idea on how scrum works by now. Let’s dive in deep and learn about scrum framework in detail

Scrum Roles

Scrum master:

Scrum master helps the scrum team to work together efficiently towards the sprint goal; Ensures scrum process is followed as intended and educates the team on scrum process (Team Scrum’s expert).

Protects the team from external distractions and removes team impediments if any. The Servant-Leader (Servant first, Leads the team next)

Ideally this should not be played by line manager. But if a line manager can honestly play scrum master’s role by keeping everything aside, then why not? (Just think about it)

Facilitates all activities in scrum, Helps team to focus on identifying a meaningful functionality that can be achieved in the sprint in the order of product backlog priority

Product Owner:

Product owner is the voice of the customer and represents stakeholders. Accountable for ensuring that team delivers value to the business by product backlog management (prioritizing product backlog before each sprint, adding new things to the product backlog, refines product backlog and communicates customer requirements to the team)

Defines product features; Responsible for Project management, Product management and Product marketing. PO acts as a bridge between Customer and the scrum team and is at least 50% available to the scrum team

Responsible for ROI (Return on Investment), optimizes the business value of the work done by scrum team. PO is responsible for project schedule, project cost tracking & Estimation, change management

Explains customer requirements to the team and clarifies their doubts if any. PO accepts or rejects the sprint deliverables based on the defined acceptance criteria. PO needs to accept the product increment before it reaches the customer

PO in release planning: Creates project management plan, Responsible for determining the release dates by tracking team’s performance matrices.

The Members of the Development Team:

Team which turns the product backlog into product increment (Potentially shippable product); Cross functional team who do the actual product development. Involves different roles i.e. Business analyst, UX Expert, Programmer, Database administrator, Release Engineer, Technical Architect, Tester, Technical Writer, User Interface Specialist, Quality Assurance, Developer and any other role required for delivering product increment

Autonomous and self-organizing team, Size is ideally considered as 7±2, who works full time

Selects the refined requirements to deliver in Sprint, divides the selected stories into tasks, Estimates work and decide how many stories will be delivered by end of sprint and finally commits to Sprint goal

Creates work breakdown structure, Determine how team accomplishes work

Demonstrates product increment to the customers in sprint review meeting and releases to the customers

Scrum Ceremonies

Product backlog refinement meeting:

It is an ongoing process for reviewing product backlog items (PBIs), main objective of this meeting is to keep backlog ready for next 2 sprints by creating, refining, estimating and prioritizing PBIs. Duration and frequency of the meeting is decided by the scrum team.

Product backlog consists of User Stories (Something which user wants), Epics (Big User story) and Themes (Bigger User story)

Large PBIs gets broken down in to smaller user stories which makes them clear and executable for teams once they pick these for sprint execution

Enrich PBIs with new details and Re-Prioritize PBIs based on the business scope

Sprint Planning Meeting:

Meeting is held at beginning of the sprint cycle to select refined PBIs to be done for the sprint.

Meeting duration is 8 hours for 30 days sprint

Attendees for this meeting: DT, SM and PO

It is maximum 8 Hours for 30days sprint. First 4 hours are spent on team discussion for prioritizing the product backlog. Next 4 hours are spent on DT making a plan for the sprint

It results in Sprint Backlog (List of PBIs selected to be done in the sprint)

Daily Scrum Meeting:

Daily scrum meeting occurs each day during the sprint. DT meets @ specific time & place to synchronize activities in the team.

Meeting duration is time-boxed up to 15 minutes

Attendees for this meeting: DT, Optional (SM, PO)

It has certain guidelines mentioned below

DT needs to come prepared with updates

Starts by specific time even if some team member is missing

DT tells about three things

What have you done from yesterday’s daily scrum today’s daily scrum?

What are you planning to do from today’s daily scrum to tomorrow’s daily scrum?

Are there any impediments blocking your work progress?

Scrum master makes a note of impediments and works towards resolving it outside the meeting. No detailed discussions happens in this meeting

Sprint Review Meeting:

Sprint review meeting is held at the end of a sprint cycle. Scrum team reviews the work completed and the planned work which is not completed.

Scrum team demos completed work (Product increment/Potentially shippable product) to internal and external stakeholders. Stakeholders review the product increment and provide feedback to the scrum team

Duration: Max 4 Hours for 30 days sprint

Attendees for this meeting would be SM, PO, DT and Stakeholders

Product owner makes a note of the stakeholder’s feedback and adds/changes PBIs based on the same

Sprint Retrospective Meeting:

Sprint retrospective meeting is held at the end of a sprint cycle. This meeting is for team to inspect itself and search for improvements

Duration: Max 3 Hours for 30 days sprint

Attendees for this meeting would be SM, DT and PO

Team gathers data of what worked well and what needs improvement in the past sprint with regard to product, process and what not, everything related to scrum team

Scrum master asks questions to the team and generate insights based on the data provided by the team

Team creates a list of Action items and prioritizes the action items based on team voting agreement

Request volunteer owner for action items and volunteers will be responsible for that action item once it is assigned

Scrum Artifacts

After going through scrum ceremonies, you might have got an idea of scrum artifacts as well. Let’s see them in detail

Product backlog:

List of product requirements in a prioritized order, priority of product backlog items is done by product owner based on business value, risk and dependencies etc

Product backlog consists of features, Bug fixes, non functional requirements, anything and everything required to fulfill product vision

Product backlog is open and any one can change it but product is responsible for prioritizing them based on discussions with customer

Usually, PBIs are in user story format

As a <WHO|ROLE>

I want <WHAT|FEATURE>

So that <WHY|PURPOSE>

Each PBI contains business value, DT effort estimation i.e. estimations are given as story points as unit. Story points should be from Fibonacci sequence. These estimations will help PO in release planning

Estimations given by DT team should be either story points or estimated hours of effort to complete the task

Sprint Backlog:

Sprint backlog is a list of product backlog items selected for the next sprint & associated tasks and this has been derived from top list items of product backlog

DT selects PBIs based on the past sprint velocity if available or else dive and swim if it is first sprint of a new project

PBIs are broken down in to tasks by the DT. DT team members chooses the tasks based on their skill set which is a part of self-organization of the DT

These are written on sticky notes and pasted on a board under categories “To do”, “In Progress” and “Done”

No additional items can be added to sprint backlog once it is committed. Only DT is allowed to make changes for sprint backlog if needed

Once Sprint goal is achieved, scrum team analyses product backlog and go for next set of items for next sprint

Product Increment:

Product increment is nothing but potentially shippable product completed during the sprint. At the end of the sprint product increment needs to fulfill “Definition of DONE” criteria (also called as EXIT criteria).

According to scrum.org, “Definition of Done” is a shared understanding of what it means for work to be complete, to ensure transparency

Definition of done is defined by scrum team. If product increment needs to be deployed to the user, then it should complete all the criteria pre-defined by the team

Example of Definition of DONE criteria: Analyzed, Designed, Implemented, Reviewed, Tested, Packaged, Automated, Deployed, Integrated, Accepted by PO, No known BUGS and Got feedback from Customer

Once the product increment is passed through EXIT criteria, it should be in usable condition irrespective of whether PO is releasing it or not

Scrum Rules

Whatever we have been discussing in this post, all are scrum rules. Officially, the Scrum Guide is the Scrum rulebook maintained by Scrum.org, Ken Schwaber, and Jeff Sutherland. Please download your copy here and go through it

Apart from Scrum roles, Scrum ceremonies and Scrum artifacts in Scrum framework, you need to know some commonly used scrum terminology.

Sprint Burn-down chart: Sprint Burn-down chart is a graphical representation to track sprint progress.  Shows remaining work in the sprint backlog.  Number of days in the sprint is taken on X-axis and Number of hours OR Number of story points is taken on Y-axis to plot the graph. Sample graph is given below

Release Burn-down chart: Release Burn-down chart is a graphical representation to track release progress. It shows the amount of work left to complete to reach release target. Number of sprints is taken on the X-axis and On Y-axis, it is up to the team to decide. It can be Story points, Team days or ideal days.

Scrum task board: Team members lists the tasks of the sprint under the categories “To do”, “In Progress”, “Done” in a big board which is called as scrum task board and updates the tasks on daily basis. Ideally before attending the daily scrum meeting

Team Velocity: The number of story points (Product backlog effort) completed in one sprint is considered as team velocity

Abnormal Termination: When product owner realizes that it makes no sense or business value to continue sprint, PO can cancel the sprint at any point of sprint duration is called abnormal termination. Inputs for this process can be given by SM, DT or management

Spike: SPIKE is a technical investigation or collecting more information with respect to one task. It can have maximum time box size of one sprint. For more information on spikes click here

ScrumBut: It is an exception to the pure scrum methodology. Scrum framework which has been changed based on the needs is called ScrumBut

Technical Debt: (also known as Design Debt or Code Debt). The debt is a particular task that needs to be done before it is considered as complete in codebase. If it is not repaid (Fixed) in the early stage, it accumulates eventually making it hard implement later on

With this we have completed scrum framework. Let us look at advanced scrum concepts in posts after completing agile methodologies. Thank you for stopping by and reading my blog, it means a lot to me. Help me to improve by giving your feedback. I appreciate it very much! Please feel free to reach out to me

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-Balaji Sathram