Scrum

Contents 1 Scrum Overview 2 The Scrum Events 3 Scrum Artifacts 4 Sources & References

Scrum Overview

Scrum (n): A framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.

Scrum is:

• Lightweight - It is considered lightweight because it has a minimal set of rules and roles, is easy to understand and to start using. It does not prescribe specific practices or techniques for completing work, but rather provides a framework for managing and organizing the process.
• Simple to understand - It is easy to understand because it is based on a small set of clear roles, events, and artifacts, which are easy to learn and remember.
• Difficult to master - Is considered difficult to master because it requires a deep understanding of it's principles and a strong organizational commitment to following the framework along with a mindset change in terms of how work is organized and executed.

Scrum is an agile way to manage a project, usually software development. Agile software development with Scrum is often perceived as a methodology; but rather than viewing Scrum as methodology, think of it as a framework for managing a process.

Scrum is a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.

Scrum relies on a self-organizing, cross-functional team. The scrum team is self-organizing in that there is no overall team leader who decides which person will do which task or how a problem will be solved. Those are issues that are decided by the team as a whole.

In Scrum, the team is cross-functional, meaning everyone is required to take a feature from idea to implementation, normally team members are skills in several technologies or disciplines at the same time.

The strength of Scrum lies in its small, highly flexible, and adaptive team structure, which can be scaled to work in single, multiple, or networked teams. These teams collaborate and interoperate through sophisticated development architectures and target release environments.

Within agile development, Scrum teams are supported by two specific roles:

• ScrumMaster - Who can be thought of as a coach for the team, helping team members use the Scrum process to perform at the highest level.
• Product Owner (PO) - Represents the business, customers or users, guides the team toward building the right product and it's empowered to make decisions on what to build and if increments are released or not to end-users.

There is a third role within the Scrum team and that is the role of the Developers these are the highly skilled team members tasked with creating and building the potentially releasable increment during the Sprint.

Per the Scrum Guide the successful use of Scrum depends on people becoming more proficient in the five values of Scrum those where added back in July 2016 to the guide and are Courage, Focus, Commitment, Respect, and Openness.

The Scrum Events

Agile software development is a fuzzy term that encompasses everything that’s not waterfall software development; waterfall being a multi month cycle of planning-developing-testing with discreet stages. Scrum is a specific, iterative way of doing agile.

Scrum is composed of several scrum events:

• Sprint
• Sprint Planning
• Daily Scrum
• Sprint Review
• Sprint Retrospective

Scrum Artifacts

The artifacts defined in Scrum provide key information that the Scrum Team and the stakeholders need to be aware of for understanding the product under development, the activities being planned, and the activities done in the project. The following artifacts are defined in Scrum Process Framework.

• Product Backlog - a prioritized list of items, such as user stories or requirements, that the team needs to deliver in order to achieve the project's goals.
• Sprint Backlog - a list of items from the product backlog that the team commits to completing during the current sprint.
• Increment - An increment is a potentially releasable piece of software. In Scrum, each sprint results in an increment of the product, which is a fully functional and usable piece of software that can be potentially released to the end-users. The product increment is the sum of all the product backlog items that were completed during that sprint, integrated with all previous increments. It should be noted that the decision of releasing or not is up to the product owner.

Sources & References

Scrum Guide
What is Scrum ?. Schwaber, K., & Sutherland, J.
Scrum Methodology and Project Management.Cohn, M.
Changes to the Scrum Guide