I really enjoyed refreshing my Scrum practice, when I recently attended Scrum master training with Paul Goddard from Agilify. Below is a quick overview of Scrum.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is an Agile framework for software development.
The ability to respond to change and deliver useful quality products quickly through incremental development and client participation.
Scrum makes use of…
Cross skilled self-organising groups that work at a sustainable rate.
This leads to my favourite outcome:
Sane happy people make nice code!
Scrum manifesto
Scrum has a manifesto of core principles which I will paraphrase below as:
- Continuous customer satisfaction
- Advantage through change
- Frequent functional deliveries
- Constant team collaboration
- Trust the team
- Get together often
- Delivery = Progress
- On-going sustainable development
- On-going best practice
- Keep it simple – Think less waste and minimal viable product.
- Collaboration optimises results
- Learning from experience
What are the roles within a Scrum team?
Scrum Master
This role is to facilitate and coach the team. To assist in the application of the Scrum framework. As teams are self-managing, this role must support the group developing the product not dictate to the team nor assign tasks.
Product owner
Essentially the client. Scrum relies on strong client participation, co-locating with the team. Continual prioritisation of tasks and feedback help to deliver a relevant product and high customer satisfaction.
Team members
The doers – makers, fixers, testers, designers, sysadmins, developers, … Scrum teams tend to be made up of between 4 to 9 people. Smaller teams are more likely to suffer from a lack of a range of skills.
Key Scrum meetings and artefacts
- Product vision – what are we building and why.
- Product backlog – a continually reprioritised list of high-level product features or tasks.
- Daily stand up meetings – 15 minutes long and should include all team members.
- Sprints – development blocks of a fixed length between 1 to 4 weeks long.
- Deliverables – A functional and potentially deployable deliverable should be produced at the end of each sprint.
- Sprint planning meetings – this can be scheduled to last for 1 hour for each week of sprint’s length. Product backlog items are selected to be implemented in this sprint and more detailed planning of their implementation is done at this point.
- Sprint review meetings – A wider user engagement meeting where more user and or clients are shown the Sprint deliverable
- Sprint retrospective meetings – a look back at how the previous sprint went and ways to improve going forward.
Find out more
Starting with a short fun overview of key Scrum concepts – muppets included.
Scrum for Schmucks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJV-kgj4m68&feature=youtu.be
Learn about Scrum https://www.scrumalliance.org/why-scrum
What is Scrum https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-scrum
