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Scrum

What is it?

An agile development methodology

Details?

Scrum has three primary areas of focus

1) Definition of roles

2) Existence of backlogs

3) Time-boxed meetings

Know your role

Two classes of people

Image by KB35

Image by rumpleteaser

A chicken and pig start a breakfast shop called Bacon & Eggs

The chicken has an interest in the project

But the pig has skin in the game

Core roles

Scrum Master

Enforces Scrum practices

Removes roadblocks

Closest role to a project manager

Product owner

Maintains the product backlog

Creates user stories

Sets preferred order of completion

Business owner for the project

The team

Designers, Developers, QA, etc.

Own workload for a given cycle

Set expectations

Deliver on promises

Artifacts of Scrum

Product backlog

Prioritized list of user stories

Created and ranked by product owner

Sprint backlog

List of user stories selected from the product backlog

Selected by the team, not the product owner

All tasks in the sprint backlog should fit into one sprint cycle

What is this sprint thing?

A sprint is a 30 day work cycle

At the beginning of a sprint user stories are selected

Selected by the team, not the product owner

This is the most difficult transition for an organization to make

At the end of the sprint these same user stories are demonstrated

Demonstrated as fully-functional, shippable, unit-tested deliverables

Shippable

in 30 days

The team controls the workload

And must be honest and accurate in estimates

Constant feature delivery builds trust

And makes it easier for the business to buy-in to scrum

Time-boxed meetings

Sprint planning meeting

8 hours

First four hours for the product owner presenting the product backlog

Final four hours for the team deciding on workload and doing initial design and estimation

Daily sprint meeting

15 minutes

What did you do?

What are you going to do?

Do you have any roadblocks?

Sprint Expo

4 hours

End of sprint show-and-tell

Sprint retrospective

4 hours

What went wrong this sprint?

What went right this sprint?

That seems like a lot of meetings

8 + (.25*20) + 4 + 4 = 21 hours of meetings

21 hours of 176 hours = 17% overhead

21 hours of 176 hours = 17% overhead

Significant, but workable

That's Scrum