Do you need a more agile approach to your web Development?

Scrum development might be the solution to your issues. Here is everything you need to know in order to have a successful scrum development.

Scrum, a small introduction

Scrum is an iterative incremental framework for managing complex work (such as new product development) commonly used with agile software development. Although the word is not an acronym, some companies implementing the process have been known to spell it with capital letters as SCRUM. This may be due to one of Ken Schwaber’s early papers, which capitalized SCRUM in the title.
Although Scrum was intended for management of software development projects, it can be used to run software maintenance teams, or as a general project/program management approach.

The history of Scrum – it is all about speed and flexibility

In 1986, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka described a new holistic approach that increases speed and flexibility in commercial new product development. They compare this new holistic approach, in which the phases strongly overlap and the whole process is performed by one cross-functional team across the different phases, to rugby, where the whole team “tries to go to the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth”. The case studies come from the automotive, photo machine, computer and printer industries.
In 1991, DeGrace and Stahl, in Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions, referred to this approach as Scrum, a rugby term mentioned in the article by Takeuchi and Nonaka. In the early 1990s, Ken Schwaber used an approach that led to Scrum at his company, Advanced Development Methods. At the same time, Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales, and Jeff McKenna developed a similar approach at Easel Corporation and were the first to call it Scrum. In 1995 Sutherland and Schwaber jointly presented a paper describing Scrum at OOPSLA ’95 in Austin, TX, its first public appearance. Schwaber and Sutherland collaborated during the following years to merge the above writings, their experiences, and industry best practices into what is now known as Scrum. In 2001, Schwaber teamed up with Mike Beedle to describe the method in the book Agile Software Development with Scrum.

Characteristics of a Scrum approach – using Sprints to be faster and more flexible

Scrum is a “process skeleton,” which contains sets of practices and predefined roles. The main roles in Scrum are:

ScrumMaster – maintains the processes (typically in lieu of a project manager);
Product Owner – represents the stakeholders
Team – cross-functional group of about 7 people who do the actual analysis, design, implementation, testing, etc.

During each “sprint“, typically a two to four week period (with the length being decided by the team), the team creates a potentially shippable product increment (for example, working and tested software). The set of features that go into a sprint come from the product “backlog,” which is a prioritized set of high level requirements of work to be done. Which backlog items go into the sprint is determined during the sprint planning meeting. During this meeting, the Product Owner informs the team of the items in the product backlog that he or she wants completed. The team then determines how much of this they can commit to complete during the next sprint. During a sprint, no one is allowed to change the sprint backlog, which means that the requirements are frozen for that sprint. After a sprint is completed, the team demonstrates the use of the software.
Scrum enables the creation of self-organizing teams by encouraging co-location of all team members, and verbal communication across all team members and disciplines that are involved in the project.
A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.
There are several implementations of systems for managing the Scrum process, which range from yellow stickers and whiteboards, to software packages. One of Scrum’s biggest advantages is that it is very easy to learn and requires little effort to start using.

Scrum Roles – pig and chicken story

A number of roles are defined in Scrum. All roles fall into two distinct groups—pigs and chickens—based on the nature of their involvement in the development process. These groups get their names from a joke about a pig and a chicken opening a restaurant:

A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, “Hey, why don’t we open a restaurant?” The pig looks back at the chicken and says, “Good idea, what do you want to call it?” The chicken thinks about it and says, “Why don’t we call it ‘Ham and Eggs’?” “I don’t think so,” says the pig, “I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved.”

So the “pigs” are committed to building software regularly and frequently, while everyone else is a “chicken”—interested in the project but really indifferent because if it fails they’re not the pigs—that is, they weren’t the ones that committed to doing it. The needs, desires, ideas and influences of the chicken roles are taken into account, but are not in any way allowed to affect, distort or get in the way of the actual Scrum project.

Pig roles

The Pigs are the ones committed to the project in the Scrum process—they are the ones with “their bacon on the line.”

• Product Owner – The Product Owner represents the voice of the customer. He/she ensures that the Scrum Team works with the “right things” from a business perspective. The Product Owner writes customer-centric items (typically user stories), prioritizes them and then places them in the product backlog.
• ScrumMaster (or Facilitator) – Scrum is facilitated by a ScrumMaster, whose primary job is to remove impediments to the ability of the team to deliver the sprint goal. The ScrumMaster is not the leader of the team (as the team is self-organizing) but acts as a buffer between the team and any distracting influences. The ScrumMaster ensures that the Scrum process is used as intended. The ScrumMaster is the enforcer of rules. A key part of the ScrumMaster’s role is to protect the team and keep them focused on the tasks in hand. The ScrumMaster is NOT responsible for the transition from traditional methods of working to Scrum or the implementation of Scrum.
• Team – The team has the responsibility to deliver the product. A team is typically made up of 5–9 people with cross-functional skills who do the actual work (design, develop, test, technical communication, etc.).

Chicken roles

Chicken roles are not part of the actual Scrum process, but must be taken into account. They are people for whom the software is being built.

• Stakeholders (customers, vendors) – These are the people who enable the project and for whom the project will produce the agreed-upon benefit[s], which justify its production. They are only directly involved in the process during the sprint reviews.
• Managers – People who will set up the environment for the product development organizations

Meetings

Meetings are a fundamental part of the Scrum process and are key for the successful sprint.

Daily Scrum

Each day during the sprint, a project status meeting occurs. This is called a “daily scrum”, or “the daily standup”. This meeting has specific guidelines:

1. The meeting starts precisely on time
2. All are welcome, but only “pigs” may speak
3. The meeting is timeboxed to 15 minutes
4. The meeting should happen at the same location and same time every day

During the meeting, each team member answers three questions:

• What have you done since yesterday?
• What are you planning to do today?
• Do you have any problems preventing you from accomplishing your goal? (It is the role of the ScrumMaster to facilitate resolution of these impediments. Typically this should occur outside the context of the Daily Scrum so that it may stay under 15 minutes.)

Scrum of scrums

Each day normally after the daily scrum.

• These meetings allow clusters of teams to discuss their work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration.
• A designated person from each team attends.

The agenda will be the same as the Daily Scrum, plus the following four questions:[7]

• What has your team done since we last met?
• What will your team do before we meet again?
• Is anything slowing your team down or getting in their way?
• Are you about to put something in another team’s way?

Sprint Planning Meeting

At the beginning of the sprint cycle (every 15–30 days), a “Sprint Planning Meeting” is held.

• Select what work is to be done
• Prepare the Sprint Backlog that details the time it will take to do that work, with the entire team
• Identify and communicate how much of the work is likely to be done during the current sprint
• Eight hour limit

At the end of a sprint cycle, two meetings are held: the “Sprint Review Meeting” and the “Sprint Retrospective”

Sprint Review Meeting

• Review the work that was completed and not completed
• Present the completed work to the stakeholders (a.k.a. “the demo”)
• Incomplete work cannot be demonstrated
• Four hour time limit

Sprint Retrospective

• All team members reflect on the past sprint
• Make continuous process improvements
• Two main questions are asked in the sprint retrospective: What went well during the sprint? What could be improved in the next sprint?
• Three hour time limit

Artifacts

Product backlog

The product backlog is a high-level document for the entire project. It contains backlog items: broad descriptions of all required features, wish-list items, etc. prioritized by business value. It is the “What” that will be built. It is open and editable by anyone and contains rough estimates of both business value and development effort. Those estimates help the Product Owner to gauge the timeline and, to a limited extent, priority. For example, if the “add spellcheck” and “add table support” features have the same business value, the one with the smallest development effort will probably have higher priority, because the ROI is higher.
The product backlog is the property of the Product Owner. Business value is set by the Product Owner. Development effort is set by the Team.

Sprint backlog

The sprint backlog is a document containing information about how the team is going to implement the features for the upcoming sprint. Features are broken down into tasks; as a best practice, tasks are normally estimated between four and sixteen hours of work. With this level of detail the whole team understands exactly what to do, and anyone can potentially pick a task from the list. Tasks on the sprint backlog are never assigned; rather, tasks are signed up for by the team members as needed, according to the set priority and the team member skills.
The sprint backlog is the property of the Team. Estimations are set by the Team. Often an according Task Board is used to see and change the state of the tasks of the current sprint, like “to do”, “in progress” and “done”.

Burn down

The sprint burn down chart is a publicly displayed chart showing remaining work in the sprint backlog. Updated every day, it gives a simple view of the sprint progress. It also provides quick visualizations for reference. There are also other types of burndown, for example the Release Burndown Chart that shows the amount of work left to complete the target commitment for a Product Release (normally spanning through multiple iterations) and the Alternative Release Burndown Chart, which basically does the same, but allows to show clearly scope changes into a Release Content, by resetting the baseline.
It should not be confused with an earned value chart.