There are two documents that I would like to ask you to download and read. The first is “The Scrum Guide” by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland [the two co-creators of Scrum]. This is really the definitive guide to Scrum.
The second is one of my personal favourite introductions to Scrum called “Scrum in 5 minutes.” It’s a nice summary of Scrum and is beautifully produced with wonderful, easy to understand images. I often use this document when introducing Scrum to senior management and non-technical personnel.
Both documents are short, and should only take you less than 30 minutes to read. You could easily read both documents on the bus or train during your daily commute.
In the next lesson we’ll start talking about Scrum Roles and Responsibilities, but until then here’s the introductory video:
Transcript
They start at the top of the product backlog and will select work in priority order until there is sufficient work for the duration of the sprint. The team proceed to sprint planning meeting part two. This meeting is a design and architecture meeting, for the team, by the team, where they discuss strategies to meet their forecast.
The team dissects their work into a list of smaller, actionable tasks. This is called the sprint backlog. Once the sprint backlog is formed, the team can begin a sprint. A sprint is a time-box period of time, typically anywhere from one to four weeks, although I personally prefer a two weeks sprint.
During the sprint, the team members will have a daily scrum or daily stand up meeting, where each team member will talk about three things, what they did since the last meeting, what they’re going to do until the next meeting and any impediments that they might have. The daily scrum should be kept brief, no more than 15 minutes in total.
At the completion of this sprint, the team will meet with the part owner for this sprint review and demonstrate the result of the efforts over the last sprint. After the sprint review, the team will have a sprint retrospective. During this retrospective the team will to reflect upon their performance during the last sprint, and talk about what went well and what could be improved.
There are two other important roles within scrum. The Scrum Master, and the Scrum Team. The Scrum Master is responsible for the Scrum Process, for ensuring that the team adheres the scrum framework and is responsible for moving any impediments that the team may encounter. The Scum Team are responsible for self organizing to best meet their commitments to their product owner.
Ultimately, at the end of the sprint cycle, the scrum team is responsible to delivering the product to the product owner. Within Scrum a number of tools are used to invite feedback throughout the duration of the process the Sprint Burn-down chart illustrates the work remaining during a sprint. This is often drawn as a simple line chart I’m not a big fun of sprint burn-down graphs because they can be easily abused the better graph is the product burn-down graph which illustrates the amount of work remaining in the teams product backlog. This graph is often drawn as a bar chart with trending lines.
If you would like to understand Scrum better and lean how to use the Scrum Framework to build complex products, please continue to join me these video tutorials.
