Essence of Scrum Guide

Original Article I wrote here is Essence of Scrum Guide

• Lightweight
• Simple to understand
• Difficult to master
• Bind together events, roles, artifacts and interactions between them
• Based on Empiricism - Knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known
• Three Pillars
  • Transparency
  • Inspection
  • Adaptation
• Transparency - Process must be visible for those responsible for the outcome.
• Inspection - Frequent inspection of scrum artifacts and detect undesirable variance
• Adaptation - Adjustments to be made ASAP to minimize further deviations from acceptable limits
• Four Formal Events
  • Sprint Planning
  • Daily Scrum
  • Sprint Review
  • Sprint Retrospective

Scrum Players

• Scrum Team

  • Consists of
    • Product Owner
    • Dev Team
    • Scrum Master
  • They are self-organizing.
  • They know how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed
  • Delivers product in iteration
  • Done means useful version of working product

• Product Owner

  • Clearly express Product backlog
  • Prioritizing backlog
  • Optimizing dev team work
  • Ensuring backlog is visible
  • Ensure Dev Team understands items in backlog to required level
  • He is sole responsible person and he is one person, not a committee

• Development Team

  • They are self-organizing
  • Cross-Functional with all skills necessary to create a product increment
  • No title other than developer
  • No sub-teams
  • Individual in a team might focus on one thing, but whole team is accountable
  • Small enough to nimble and large enough to complete work in a sprint

• Scrum Master

  • Servant Leader for Scrum Team
  • Responsible for ensuring scrum is understood and implemented right
  • Scrum Master works with Product Owner
    • Helps to find techniques for backlog management
    • Ensures Product owner knows how to arrange the backlog
    • Facilitates scrum events as requested
  • Scrum master works with Development Team
    • Coaching in self-organizing themselves
    • Help creating high-value product
    • Removing Impediments
  • Scrum Master to Org
    • Leading and Coaching for scrum adoptation
    • Planning Scrums
    • Causing change to increase productivity

  Scrum Events

  • Events are for regularity and to minimize need for meetings
  • Events are time-boxed, every thing has a max time
  • Sprint is heart of scrum
    • time-boxed less of month or less
    • produce a useable product
    • quality goals do not decrease
    • Scope may be clarified or re-negotiated
    • Increasing the time limit of this event , increases risk
    • Cancelled when sprint goal becomes obselete
  • Sprint Planning
    • What can be delivered in the increment in the upcoming sprint
    • Product backlog is the input to the planning
    • Number of items to work from backlog is decided by dev team
    • Sprint Goal is the outcome
    • It provides the guidance for dev team on why it is building the increment
    • How will it get done ?
      • Work planned is decomposed to units of one day or less
      • Dev Team self-organizes as it moves through the sprint
      • End of planning session, Dev team should know how they intend to deliver the increment
    • Sprint Goal
      • Objective for Sprint, picked from backlog
      • provides guidance to dev team
      • Goal produces on coherent product feature or a function
      • If work turns out to be different than expected, scope is re-negotiated with product owner
  • Daily Scrum
    • 15 minute time-boxed event for dev to sync up daily
    • Plan for next 24 hours
    • Inspect work done in last 24 hours
    • Happens at same time and place each day
    • 3 Questions
      • What did I do yesterday that helped to meet the goal ?
      • What will I do today to help meet the goal ?
      • Do I see any blockers that prevents me from meeting the goal ?
    • We inspect the progress towards Goal
    • Helps to replan, adapt based on the impediments or work is different than expected
    • Improves communication, eliminate other meetings and identify blockers soon enough
    • Enables quick decision-making to replan and adapt
  • Sprint Review
    • 4 hour time-boxed event for one month sprints
    • Includes Scrum Team and key stakeholders invited by Product Owner
    • Product Owner explains what is done and what is not
    • Dev Team says what went ok and what did not
    • Dev Team demo the work Done
    • Product Owner discusses Product backlog
    • This event provides input to next Sprint Planning
    • Review Budget, timeline and potential capabilities of anticipated next product release
  • Sprint Retrospective
    • Happens after Sprint Review and next planning
    • 3 hour time-boxed meeting for one month sprint
    • Purpose
      • How last sprint went in regards to process, tools and relationships and people
      • Identify potential improvements
      • Identify the improvements for scrum team to do better

  Scrum Artifacts

  • Product backlog
    • Ordered List of everything needed in a product
    • Product owner is responsible for content, ordering
    • Backlog never complete
    • Lists all features, functions,requirements, enhancements and fixes
    • Multiple teams work on the same product and one backlog is used to describe upcoming work
    • Backlog can be updated at any time by product owner
      • Refinement consumes no more than 10% of the capacity of dev team
      • Scrum Team decides how and when the refinement is done
    • Higher Order Backlog items are clearer and lower one are more detailed
    • Backlog estimates are done by Dev Team
  • Monitoring Progress
    • At any point in time, total work remaining can be summed
    • This information is made transparent to all stakeholders
    • Trends and projective practices are used
      • Burn-Down Chart
      • Burn-ups
      • Cumulative Flows
    • Only what has happened, may be used for forward-looking decision making
  • Sprint Backlog
    • Backlog selected for the sprint
    • Dev Team forecast by dev team on what functionality will be in this sprint
    • It is modified throughout the sprint
    • As new work is required, Dev team adds it to Sprint backlog
    • Can be changed only by Dev Team
    • Total work remaining in a sprint can be summed up by using sprint backlog
    • Increment is sum of all backlog items completed in a sprint

  Artifact Transparency

  • Scrum relies on Transparency
  • More the transparency, better the decisions
  • Scrum master works with Product Owner, Dev Team and others to ensure artifact transparency
  • Transparency doesn’t occur overnight, it is a path
  • DONE must be understood by everyone. Meaning of DONE varies significantly for different players.
  • The definition of DONE is used to assess when work is complete on product Increment
  • Definition of DONE guides Dev Team when selecting backlog items from Product Backlog for the sprint
  • Each Increment is additive to prior increments and they are thoroughly tested

  END NOTE

  • Scrum’s roles, artifacts, events and rules are immutable
  • Scrum exists in entirety. It can be implemented partially, but then it is not scrum.

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