SCRUM

What is SCRUM?

The class time designated to SCRUM was one that I was unable to attend, however I have made all the necessary preparations and reading to understand the way of SCRUM.

SCRUM is used by many people in many different industries, as it serves as a framework for a new product development. It allows for the members to learn about the work they do and the processes they use to do so. They focus on incremental improvement constantly, and have designated phases called ‘sprints’ which are fixed length iterations. These sprint contain combinations of different phases in scrum in combination with testing and design.

What its not

What SCRUM is not is an assumption that we have perfect knowledge from the beginning and that mistakes are non-existent or kept to a minimum. this invites big risks and failure to both the product and its members.

Scrum Elements

SCRUM is created on the basis of various different elements and roles. The 3 roles in SCRUM allow for flexibility, responsibility, and comfortability to be conducted.

Product Owner

• Responsible for ROI (Return on Investments)
• Focused more on the WHAT then on the HOW

Scrum Development Team

• Cross functional group – tries to develop a potentially shippable product increment every sprint
• Collaborative
• Self-organising
• Less than 9 people (Small numbers allow for better team work and collaboration)

Scrum Master

• Has no management authority
• Facilitator
• Protects the team from destruction and distraction

Artefacts

In SCRUM we also have 2 types of logs to keep organised;

Product Backlog

• Everything we might ever do
• A 1 dimensional list of priorities ranked by High-Low priority by the product owner
• If it is not on the log is doesn’t exist
• Forced ranked means that only one thing is at the top position

Sprint Backlog

• What we have planned to do during the current plan with an end date
• Keeps in check the progress of each thing
• Multiple teams have their own logs regardless if it is the same product

Meetings

Meetings are also an important aspect of SCRUM as it allows all members to come together and share their progress, thinking, and etc. There are 4 types of meetings you may come across;

Sprint Planning Meeting

• The team and the owner choose what to attempt in the sprint 
• The team pulls items from the backlog and things of how to do them and decides if it is possible  

Daily SCRUM

• Meets once per day for daily meeting  
• Defined where we stand and how to help each other  

Sprint Review Meeting

• Inspect and adapt the product  
• Team demonstrates the product to interest stakeholders and customers to get feedback 

Sprint Retrospective Meeting

• Talk about what went well and what didn’t what we learned and how we can improve  
• Provide feedback about the process they used to build the product 

Backlog Refined meeting (Not-official)

• Team and product owner look over potential candidates in their backlog and break them down 

Conclusions

SCRUM is a great framework designed for teams to reach their goals in an optimise way in all aspect and processes of the product. Everyone learned through the experimentation and the needed changes using their data as a guide and keep building upon it.