Today we’ll expand on the basics of Scrum- a flavor of Agile project management and how it can help us achieve more in less time.
Not restricted to our personal preparedness needs-
– use individually
– Immediate family (household), or extended family (family or community)
– Business continuity and disaster preparedness
Scrum Theory- founded on empirical process control theory- empiricism
– Knowledge comes from experience
- Making decisions based on what’s known
– Iterative/incremental approach- optimizes predictability and controls risk
Transparency- significant aspects must be visible to those responsible to the outcome
– Ex- what does done mean?
Inspection-
– Progress towards the goals and scrum artifacts must be inspected through the sprint
Adaptation- look for deviation- outside of acceptable limits
– If new items are identified- capture them and add to the backlog
Formal opportunities for inspection/adaptation-
– Sprint planning meeting
– Daily Scrum
– Sprint Review
– Sprint Retrospective
– Serves as a continuous feedback loop- needs/changes/relevance is continuously being groomed/refined.
Scrum Team-
– Product Owner-
- Person responsible for maximizing the value of the product-
- responsible for the backlog
- Sets priorities of the backlog
- Ensures value of work that the team will do
- Ensures everyone understands the backlog
- Development team
- Self-organizing team who do the work in the increments
- Scrum Master
- Servant leader- serves the team
- Product Owner
- Clearly communicates vision, goals, and product backlog items to the team
- Teaches the team to create clear and concise product backlog items
- Facilitates scrum events as needed or requested
- Team
- Removes impediments so the team can progress as smoothly and quickly as possible
- Organization
- Leading the organization with it’s adoption of Scrum
- Help employees and the stakeholders understand and undertake scrum and agile processes
- Product Owner
- Servant leader- serves the team
- Scrum events-
- Sprint-
- Time boxed
- No more than one month
- Begins immediately after the previous sprint’s conclusion
- No changes are made that would affect the sprint’s goals
- Clearly defined- what will be achieved in this sprint/timeframe
- Sprint planning meeting-
- What will/can be delivered in this increment?
- This defines the sprint’s items!
- How will the work needed be delivered?
- What will/can be delivered in this increment?
- Daily Scrum/Daily standup-
- Daily update meeting
- No more than 15minutes
- Not an update meeting!
- Each person answers- three questions-
- What did you work on yesterday (or since the last meeting)?
- What will you work on today?
- What obstacles (impediments) are in your way?
- Sprint Review-
- Held at the end of the sprint-
- Reviews what has been done?
- What is not done?
- What went well?
- What problems emerged and how can they be avoided/addressed?
- Review outstanding backlog
- Group collaboration on what to do in the next sprint (basis for next Sprint Planning Meeting)
- Held at the end of the sprint-
- Sprint Retrospective-
- How did the last sprint go- in regards to people, processes, relationships, and tools?
- Identify what went well- what didn’t, and potential ways to improve.
- More team-based, than task based (as in the sprint review)
- Time boxed
- Sprint-
- Scrum Artifacts-
- Project backlog
- Never complete- everything doesn’t need to be identified from the beginning- like waterfall
- Initially, only basic info needed- description, order, and estimate (effort)
- Gets groomed by team- flush out needs/concerns/impact/etc.
- Sprint backlog
- Items that were assigned/committed to the given sprint
Show Resources-
- The Scrum Field Guide- One the best books I’ve found on Implementing Scrum
- The Scrum Guide- A nice overview of Scrum
- Project backlog
