Hi my name is harshal lonare and today I am going to talk about how scrum works. Scrum is the leading agile development methodology, used by Fortune 500 companies around the world.
Before we start I Just want to make it clear that this presentation is intended for people who are just getting started with the scrum framework and need a quick introduction
In this Video we will cover following.
- Scrum vs Waterfall development
- 3 key roles in scrum
- 3 main artifacts in scrum
- 3 main ceremonies in scrum
Consider we are creating a train ticket booking system. How we will create it using waterfall. let’s start with the first point:
When we talk about waterfall; it typically goes through a lengthy planning process which could take several months followed by building the product, which again could take many months and then testing, reviewing and eventually deploying the product.
At this point you may end up bringing the wrong product to market if market demand or technology has changed since the original plan was developed.
There are several problems with this method:
- first of all the planning must be completed before any work begins and in most cases the planning is done without entirely understanding the project
- once development is being done its very often that things get sent back to the planning phase. That triggers the project either needs to start over or the developers are just criticized for not understanding the plan.
This cycle can happen many times when development is done building the product it gets thrown over the fence test, where when problems are encountered it bounces back to development and sometimes back to planning.
The same issues occur in the next few steps with lots of backstepping and doing over. This can lead to lag times and many months to several years in order to get a product out the door.
But with scrum an implementation of agile the process is broken up into smaller pieces. first we do just enough planning to get started with building the minimal feature set. we build what was planned next we test and review that small feature set and get it ready to ship.
When that cycle is complete we end up with a potentially shippable product. this process usually occurs in a time period of one to three weeks this is then repeated time and time again reducing the time from planning to development to testing. each time through the planning process we’re doing just enough planning to complete the next incremental release. you end up with several incremental releases called sprints. a sprint usually takes from one to three weeks and you just keep repeating these Sprint’s until your product is feature complete.
sometimes you may end up shipping your product after the second sprint or the third or the fourth or even further but you eventually end up with a shipping product.
You must be thinking why we are talking about roles first and then artifacts followed by ceremonies. Well because we will need to understand about roles before talking about the artifacts which actually combines together to explain about the ceremonies.
Lets talk about the three key roles. In scrum there are three key roles that are needed for the framework to work well.
First the product owner this is the person responsible for defining the features that are needed in the product. the product owner has the bright ideas that turn into products.
The scrum master is a servant leader to the team or I call it The Butler :). Scrum master is responsible for protecting the team and the process, running the meetings and keeping things going.
The team can be made up of developers testers writers and anyone else that helps in building the product. Team members often play multiple roles some days developers may end up doing tests or testers may end up writing either way the team works to get the product done.
There are three artifacts or documents that are used in scrum
- first the product backlog this is where product owners create a prioritized list of features known as user stories that could go into the product. this list evolves and changes priority with every sprint.
- user stories are a way of describing a feature set that follows the
as a user …
I need something …
so that reason …
format this way of phrasing a user story allows the product owner to specify the right amount of detail for the team to estimate the size of the task.
the highest priority user stories go into the sprint backlog these get estimated for size and are committed to for the next sprint. - Burndown charts show the progress during a sprint on the completion of tasks in the sprint backlog this chart should approach zero points as the work is being completed.
There are three ceremonies that make up scrum think of these as meetings or discussions:
- Sprint planning is where the product owner scrum master and team meet to discuss the user stories and estimate their relative sizes.
- The daily scrum is a brief stand-up meeting where the team discusses what they have completed since the previous meeting what they’re working on and anything that might be blocked or need help
- The sprint review and retrospective occurs at the end of the sprint this is where the team demonstrates the completed work to the product owner and then the team discusses what they can do to improve the process going forward.
let’s bring it all together and take a look at the scrum workflow.
start with the product backlog which is where the product owner builds a list of the bright ideas and features that could go into the product.
The product owner prioritizes the list and brings the top items to the team.
Sprint planning is where the team product owner and scrum master discussed the top priority user stories determining what can go into the next sprint. the output from the sprint planning meeting is the sprint backlog. this is a list of user stories that have been committed to for the next sprint. the entire team and product owner have a solid understanding of what each of the user stories involves based on the discussions from the sprint planning meetings.
The Sprint is a one to three-week time box where the work committed to in the sprint backlog has worked on through to completion during the Sprint the daily scrum occurs as a stand-up meeting where the team discusses what they have completed and what they are working on as well as any blocked items.
The outcome of the sprint is a potentially shippable product potentially shippable means that the product owner can decide if it is ready to ship or if there are any additional features needed before it ships.
At the end of the sprint a sprint review and sprint retrospective meeting occurs the sprint review is where the team showcases their work to the product owner and the retrospective is where the team works on what they can do to improve their process.
When Jeff Sutherland created the scrum process in 1993, he borrowed the term “scrum” from an analogy put forth in a 1986 study by Takeuchi and Nonaka, published in the Harvard Business Review. In that study, Takeuchi and Nonaka compare high-performing, cross-functional teams to the scrum formation used by Rugby teams.
