Agile PracticesSome Quick Notes on Scrum Concepts

By Rick Barron

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Building A Product

What:You come up with an idea for a product that you want to build and release to the marketplace.

Who:To get this product to market you’re going to need input from various groups...users, customers, developers, stake holders, testers, etc. More importantly, to get your project off the ground, you’ll need a product owner and a scrum master.

Source: Globus Design Associates Blog

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Product Owner

Purpose:The Product Owner’s role is to ensure the right features make it into the product backlog. The product owner is typically a project's key stakeholder. It is important that a product owner have a vision of what to build and that the product owner be able to convey that vision to the team.

Details:Besides providing direction, the product owner is commonly a lead user of the system or someone from marketing, product management, or anyone with a solid understanding of users, the market place, and the competition.

Source: Advertising & Business Ideas

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Scrum Master

Purpose:Besides being a facilitator, the scrum master makes sure the project moves forward in a smooth fashion, plus ensuring every member of the team has the tools and resources to get their job done.

Details:This person sets up the meetings, monitors the work being down, and facilitates release planning. They remove the barriers between the development and the product owner so that the product owner directly drives development. Think of this person as a Project Manager

Source: Zazzle

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Product Backlog

What:The product backlog is a prioritized features list, containing short descriptions of all functionality desired in the product.

Some details:A typical product backlog comprises the following different types of items:

1. Features

2. Bugs

3. Technical work

4. Knowledge acquisition

Source: Pichler Consulting

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Release Planning

What:To develop your Release Backlog, you start with the Product Backlog, and select the features you want in the first release.

Details:Gathering the must have features then folds into what is called the Release Backlog. It’s at this stage that the team prioritizes each feature, along with time durations for each feature so as to come up with estimated hours. Tip: Involve subject matter experts who have experience with the type of product you’re building. It will save a lot of time and mishaps. Source: Getty Images

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Sprints

What:Armed with the release backlog you now determine estimates of time durations for each feature and how they should be prioritized. Once you have estimates for all the features, you’ll have an summary of the total time required to complete your work.

Why:Next step is developing your sprints. Sprints are short duration milestones allowing the team to address a manageable amount of the project at hand, and progress towards completion for the planned launch.

Source: Scrum Development Blog

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Sprint Durations

Duration:The amount of time required really depends on the product release cycles. That said, sprints can range from 2-3 days and up to 25-30 days.

Why:Two-week sprint durations (10 business days) is the de facto standard. Why?

It allows a team to have some creativity, and provides a near-term deadline that kills procrastination and forces members challenges to the surface.

Source: Gatwaytola

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Sprint Backlogs

Objectives:Take the release backlog and split it into sprint backlogs. The best way to do that is by displaying the sprint backlog on a wall, ideally in the form of a task board.

Why:A task board is oriented in rows and columns with each row containing a particular user story and one index card or sticky note for each task involved in that story. Task cards are organized in columns, minimally including “To Do” “In Process,” and “Done.” The team is able to see work progressing across the task board during the sprint and all work to be done is visible at all times.

Source: Boris Gloger

Burndown Charts

What:How does one monitor progress? You use what is referenced as a burndown chart. The added value with the chart is that you get a visual glance regarding the status of your project instantly.

Why:With this visual, you can measure on a day-by-day basis, the work remaining for each sprint release. The trend you want to see the line moving is towards zero. Source: InfoQ

Burndown Velocity

The Slope:Viewing the burndown chart, you’re able to create the slope of the graph, what is referenced as the burndown velocity.

What:Burndown velocity is how much product backlog effort a team can handle in one sprint. This can be estimated by viewing previous sprints, assuming the team composition and sprint duration are kept constant. For example a teams rate of productivity might be that on a typical day they finish approximately 40 hours of work.

Source: Kutuma’s Ramblings

The Data

Where:Where does the data come from for the burndown chart? Stemming from the Release Planning stage, estimates were created for each selected feature in the backlog. The sum of all the estimates for each product sprint, represents the total amount of work required for each sprint.

Additionally:As progress moves forward for each sprint, updates are reflected, and showing time remaining needed to complete each item. That said, the total amount of time remaining for all features that make up a sprint, will change from day to day, until completion.

Source: Agile Alliance

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Scrum Meetings

What:A stand-up meeting is a daily team meeting held to provide a status update to the team members. Each member talks about progress since the last stand-up, the anticipated work until the next stand-up and any impediments, taking the opportunity to ask for help.

Why:The premise behind the standing is to prevent getting relaxed sitting down...time will not be wasted. Nobody likes to stand for an hour while two people are arguing about the protocol implementation details.

Source: A Deep Dive Into Agile