Improve productivity with Agile Scrum development

BANGALORE, INDIA: Scrum is agile development framework and is not a methodology, defined process or set of procedures. Scrum is an open development framework with a simple set of rules. It enables an average team to self organize into super talented team that works 10 times more productive than conventional teams. Scrum relies on a self-organizing and cross-functional team. The scrum team is self-managing. The team decides the most important stories to work to make the project successful. Product owner helps in prioritizing the backlog and current sprint.

There are three roles in scrum Product Owner, Scrum Master and Team. The ScrumMaster acts as a facilitator or a coach for the team helping to resolving impediments. The product owner acts as an interface with customers, users and other products. Each Scrum project consists of time boxed sprints for two to four weeks.

At the start of sprint, there is sprint planning meeting. The team looks at priority stories to work on and commit for delivering features at the end of sprint. At the end of sprint in retrospective meeting team demonstrates the features developed to the product owner and customers. This is the fastest way to get feedback and self correct any feature developed.

The ScrumMaster acts as the team’s coach who helps resolve any problems or blocking issues. Main importance is to improve team performance. ScrumMaster does not give direction to the team in creating stories and implementing them. He acts as a facilitator resolving issues as they come. Main job of ScrumMaster is to keep the team focused in working on tasks in hand and not get distracted by outside. Product owner's job is to create a vision for the product which sometimes called product roadmap.

From this roadmap, the backlog stories are created. Product owner with the team's help ensures that product backlog is prioritized. Product owner presents the product to customers for feedback while the project is in the development phase. This is different than waterfall model where the customer needs to commit to requirements. 

Team consists of everyone who is responsible for making the project successful. The team signs up for stories in sprint. Each person takes a story and first put estimates for writing story tests, coding and acceptance testing.

The product backlog consists of list of stories which need to be done before the product can be released to the customer. Product owner helps in prioritizing feature list. The best way to create backlog is to define user stories. User stories are description of feature functionality from the perspective of customer who is going to use the system. First task for any project is Sprint zero planning, which consists of spikes for research items.

In sprint zero team create project backlog.  Other prominent artifact is the spring burn down chart and release burn down chart. Burndown is a management tool to find out the remaining work for a sprint or a release. Burndown helps management understand how the project is performing and whether the promised completion date for the project can be met.

Daily scrums help team members to synchronize work and help in resolving any problems which might occur during development and testing. The primary artifact of the scrum is shippable code at the end of sprint. This means the code is written, tested and accepted within the same iteration.

One noteworthy facet of Scrum is the fact that product owner or customer can change the requirements in the middle of implementation. In the waterfall model we wish that the customer knows what he wants. The developers know how to build it. Nothing will change along the way. The reality is opposite of this wishful thinking. We have to live with the customer discovering what he wants. The developers discover how to build software. Many things can change along the way. Agile Scrum development helps in making this possible.