Essence of Scrum Guide

Contents

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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