Agile and Scrum – Quick Guide

What is Agile?

It is the ability to create and respond to change.

Agile Manifesto

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
• Respond to changes over following a plan.

Agile is applied by working in accordance with the agile manifesto and the 12 principles behind it

What is Scrum

Scrum is a simple framework for effective team collaboration on complex software projects (agility).

Scrum is defined completely in the Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, the originators of Scrum. You can download scrum guide from this link.

Scrum consists of

• 3 Roles
• 5 Events
• 3 Artifacts
• and the Rules that bind them together

You can check scrum competences on this link.

Definition of Done

Definition of done is managed by scrum team and it has a shared understanding of completeness and release quality.

A sample definition of done

• Peer reviewed.
• Webpage served within 2 sec.
• Accepted by Product Owner.
• Unit and Integration Tested.

Sprint Goal (A commitment target)

Sprint goals provide an objective during a sprint.

Sample print goals

• Provide credit-card processing.
• Enable payment by PayPal.
• Provide review basket functionality.
• Delivery home page menu-system.

3-Roles (each one has a specific responsibility)

• Product-Owner: Responsible for maximizing the value of the product.
• Development-Team: Usually b/w 3 and 9 peoples, responsible for creating Done increments.
• Scrum-Master: Responsible for promoting scrum and supporting the scrum team.

5-Events (each one has a specific purpose)

Scrum uses time-boxed events such that every event has a maximum duration. These are time-boxed gatherings that bring people together to plan, problem solve and generate good outcomes at the event’s conclusion.

Sprint-Planning

We start with a product-backlog and end with sprint-goal and sprint-backlog.

• From: Product-Backlog
• To : Sprint-Goal, Sprint-Backlog

8 hours for a 1-month sprint. Shorter for less sprint duration.

Daily-Scrum

We examine a progress over the last 24 hours and look to update the sprint backlog and the plan for next 24 hours.

• From: Daily-Progress, Sprint-Backlog
• To : Update daily-plan

15 minutes time-box where dev team inspect progress and re-plan if required.

Sprint-Review

We look at the sprint and inspect the increments with a view to update the product backlog.

• From: Sprint, Increment
• To : Update Product-Backlog

4 hours time-box for 1-month sprint.

Sprint-Retrospective

We examine how the sprint went with regards to people and processes with the intention of finding improvements for the next sprint.

• From: Past sprint
• To : Improvements for next sprint

3 hours time-box for 1-month sprint.

Sprint

This is a container event that contains all the prior listed events. It has duration of one month or less.

Check again Sprint-Framework-Poster above.

3-Artifactrs (each one contains specific information)

Scrum has just 3 artifacts.

• Product Backlog
  • Holds all the requirement for the product.
  • Managed by the product-owner.
• Sprint Backlog
  • Holds all work for Sprint-Goal.
  • Managed by the development-team.
• Increment
  • Working addition to the Product.
  • Always potentially releasable.

Scrum summary

Scrum consists of

• 3 roles
• 5 events
• 3 artifacts

and the rules that bind them together.

Scrum is

• Lightweight.
• Simple to understand.
• Difficult to master.

Understanding Empiricism (Empirical Process Control)

“Situation dictates the type of process”

• Defined (e.g. Car manufacturing)
• Empirical (e.g. Cell phones)

The defined process is based on the premise that the initial information and assumptions are valid throughout the entire planning horizon and that we don’t need to change anything.

But the reality for complex product endeavors like software-development is a 35% change in requirement and more than 60% of functionality being never or rarely used.

Defined processes are ok when the problem is simple or we have repeated outputs of the same product.

Empirical is better suited for complex product work. We accept that our plan will change and we plan continuously throughout the work.

Scrum is founded on empiricism which asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known.

Three pillars uphold every implementation of empirical process control

• Transparency
• Inspection
• Adaptation