I Can’t Sleep - Scrum Software Development | Calm Bedtime Reading
Episode Date: May 16, 2022Relax with this calm bedtime reading on Scrum, a framework in software development that helps teams work together, perfect for easing insomnia and restless nights. Benjamin’s soothing cadence explai...ns the basics of agile practices, teamwork, and iterative progress, turning a technical subject into a gentle, sleep-friendly exploration. No whispering, no hypnosis—just calm, fact-filled education to quiet your mind, reduce stress, and support deep rest. Learn something new while your body relaxes, and let the steady rhythm of Benjamin’s voice guide you into peaceful dreams. Press play, close your eyes, and drift away. Want More? Request a Topic: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/request-a-topic Ad-Free Episodes: https://icantsleep.supportingcast.fm/ Shop Sleep-Friendly Products: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/sponsors Join the Discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/myhGhVUhn7 This content is derived from the Wikipedia article on Scrum (software development), available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. Read the full article: Wikipedia – Scrum (software development). Happy sleeping! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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episode is from a Wikipedia article titled Scrum.
Within project management, Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining products in a complex environment,
with an initial emphasis on software development, although it has been used in other fields including research, sales, marketing, and advanced technologies.
It is designed for teams of 10 or fewer members who break their work into goals that can be completed within time-boxed iterations.
called sprints, no longer than one month and most commonly two weeks. The scrum team assesses
progress in time box daily meetings of 15 minutes or less called daily scrums, a form of stand-up
meeting. At the end of the sprint, the team holds two further meetings, the sprint review,
which demonstrates the work done to stakeholders to elicit feedback, and sprint retrospective,
which enables the team to reflect and improve.
Name.
The software development term scrum was first used in a 1986 paper titled
The New New Product Development Game by Herodica Takayuchi and Icojiro Nunaka.
The paper was published in the January 1986 issue of Harvard Business Review.
The term is borrowed from rugby where a scrum is a formation of players.
The term scrum was chosen by the paper's author because it emphasizes teamwork.
Scrum is occasionally seen written in all capitals.
While the word itself is not an acronym, its capitalized styling likely comes from an early
paper by Ken Schwabber that capitalized Scrum in its title.
While the trademark of the term scrum itself has been allowed to lapse, it is now deemed as a generic
trademark owned by the wider community rather than an individual.
Key Ideas
Scrum is a lightweight, iterative, and incremental framework for developing, delivering,
and sustaining complex products.
The framework challenges assumptions of the traditional sequential approach to product development
and enables teams to self-organized by encouraging physical collocation
or close online collaboration of all team members,
as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines involved.
A key principle of scrum is the dual recognition that customers will change the scope of what is wanted,
often called requirements volatility,
and that there will be unpredictable challenges for which a predictive or planned approach is not suited.
These changes come from a variety of sources, but according to scrum,
understanding why is irrelevant, and change should simply be accepted, embraced, and analyzed for benefits.
As such, Scram adopts an evidence-based empirical approach, accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined up front,
and instead focusing on how to maximize the team's ability to deliver quickly,
to respond to emerging requirements, and to adapt to evolving technologies and changes in market conditions.
History
Herodica Takeuchi and Ikajira Nanaka introduced the term scrum in the context of product development
in their 1986 Harvard Business Review article, the new new product development game.
Takeuchi and Nonaka later argued in the knowledge-creating company that it is a form of organizational
knowledge creation, especially good at bringing about innovation continuously,
incrementally, and spirally.
The authors described a new approach to commercial product development
that would increase speed and flexibility
based on case studies from manufacturing firms
in the automotive, photocopier, and printer industries.
They called this the holistic or rugby approach,
as the whole process is performed by one cross-functional team
across multiple overlapping phases,
in which the team tries to go the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth.
In rugby football, a scrum is used to restart play as the forwards of each team interlock with their heads down
and attempt to gain possession of the ball.
The Scrum framework was based on research by Schwabur with Babatunde Aganake at DuPont Research Station
and University of Delaware.
Hoganake advised that attempts to develop complex products such as software that weren't based in empiricism
were doomed to higher risks and rates of failure as the initial conditions and assumptions change.
Empiricism, using frequent inspection and adaptation with flexibility and transparency, is the most
suitable approach. In the early 1990s, Ken Schwabber used what would become scrum at his company,
advanced development methods, while Jeff Sutherland, John Scumnetales, and Jeff McKenna
developed a similar approach at Easel Corporation, referring to it using the single word, scrum.
Sutherland and Schwabber works together to integrate their ideas into a single framework,
Scrum. They tested Scrum and continually improved it, leading to their 1995 paper contributions
to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in 2001, and the worldwide spread and use
of Scrum since 2002. In 1995, Sutherland and Schwabber jointly presented a paper describing the
Scrum framework at the Business Object Design and Implementation Workshop, held as part of object-oriented
programming, systems, languages, and applications, 95, Uppsla 95 in Austin, Texas.
Over the following years, Schwabber and Sutherland collaborated to combine this material
with their experience and evolving good practice to develop what became known as Scrum.
In 2001, Schwabber worked with Mike Beal to describe the method in the book, Agile Software Development
with Scrum.
Scrum's approach to planning and managing product development involves bringing decision-making authority to the level of operation properties and certainties.
In 2002, Schwabber with others founded the Scrum Alliance and set up the certified Scrum Accreditation Series.
Schwabber left the Scrum Alliance in late 2009 and founded scrum.org, which oversees the parallel professional scrum accreditation series.
Since 2009, a public document called the Scrum Guide has been published and updated by Schwabr and Sutherland.
It had been revived six times with the current version being November 2020.
Scrum Team
The fundamental unit of Scrum is a small team of people, consisting of a product owner, a scrum master, and developers.
The team is self-managing, cross-functional, and focuses on one objective at a time.
The product goal.
Product owner.
The product owner, representing the product stakeholders and the voice of the customer,
or may represent the desires of a committee, is responsible for delivering good business results.
Hence, the product owner is accountable for the product backlog and for maximizing the value that the team delivers.
The product owner defines the product in terms of customer-centric outcomes,
typically but not limited to user stories,
adds them to the product backlog
and prioritizes them based on importance and dependencies.
A scrum team should have only one product owner,
although a product owner could support more than one team,
and it is strongly advised against combining this role
with the role of the scrum master.
The product owner should focus on the business side of product development
and spend the majority of time liaising with stakeholders and the team.
The product owner does not dictate how the team reaches a technical solution,
but seeks consensus among team members.
This role is crucial and requires a deep understanding of both sides,
the business and the engineers, developers, in the scrum team.
Therefore, a good product owner should be able to communicate what the business needs,
ask why they need it, because there may be better ways to achieve that,
and convey the message to all stakeholders,
including the developers using technical language as required.
The product owner uses scrum's empirical tools to manage highly complex work
while controlling risk and achieving value.
Communication is a core responsibility of the product owner,
the ability to convey priorities and emphasize with team members and stakeholders
is vital to steer product development in the right direction.
The product owner role bridges the communication gap between the team and its stakeholders,
serving as a proxy for stakeholders to the team
and as a team representative to the overall stakeholder community.
As the face of the team to the stakeholders,
the following are some of the communication tasks of the product owner to the stakeholders.
Define and announce releases.
Communicate delivery and product status.
Share progress during governance meetings.
Share significant RIDAs, risks, impediments, dependencies, and assumptions with stakeholders.
Negotiate priorities, scope, funding, and schedule.
Ensure that the product backlog is visible, transparent, and clear.
Ability to relate is a key attribute for a product owner to have,
the ability to put oneself in another shoes.
A product owner converses with different stakeholders
with a variety of backgrounds, job roles, and objectives,
and should be able to appreciate these different points of view.
To be effective, it is wise for a product owner
to know the level of detail the audience needs.
The developers need thorough feedback and specifications
so they can build a product up to expectation.
while an executive sponsor may just need summaries of progress.
Providing more information than necessary may lose stakeholder interest and waste time.
A direct means of communication is preferred by seasoned product owners.
A product owner's ability to communicate effectively is also enhanced by being skilled in techniques
that identify stakeholder needs, negotiate priorities between stakeholder interests,
and collaborate with developers to ensure effective implementation of requirements.
Developers
The developers carry out all work required to build increments of value every sprint.
The term developers refers to anyone who plays a role in the development and support of the system or product
and can include researchers, architects, designers, data specialists, statisticians, analysts, analysts, engineers,
programmers and testers, among others.
However, due to the confusion that can arise when some people do not feel the term
developer applies to them, they are often referred to just as team members.
The team is self-organizing.
While no work should come to the team except through the product owner,
and the scrum master is expected to protect the team from distractions,
the team are encouraged to interact directly with customers and or stakeholders to gain
maximum understanding and immediacy of feedback.
Scrum Master
Scrum is facilitated by a scrum master,
who is accountable for removing impediments to the ability of the team to deliver
the product goals and deliverables.
The scrum master is not a traditional team lead or project manager,
but acts as a barrier between the team and any distracting influences.
The scrum master ensures that the scrum framework is followed by coaching the team,
and scrum theory and concepts, often facilitating key sessions, and encourages the team to grow and to
improve. The role has also been referred to as a team facilitator or servant leader to reinforce
these dual perspectives. The core responsibilities of a scrum master include, but are not limited
to, helping the product owner maintain the product backlog in a way that ensures the needed
work is well understood so the team can continually make forward progress, helping the team to
determine the definition of done for the product with input from key stakeholders, coaching the team
within the scrum principles in order to deliver high-quality features for its product,
educating key stakeholders and the rest of the organization on scrum and possibly agile principles,
helping the scrum team avoid or remove impediments to its progress, whether internal or external to the team.
Promoting self-organization and cross-functionality within the team.
Facilitating team events to ensure regular progress.
The scrum master helps people and organizations adopt empirical and lean thinking,
leaving behind hopes for certainty and predictability.
One of the ways the scrum master role differs from a project manager
is that the latter may have people management responsibilities
and the scrum master does not.
The scrum master provides a limited amount of direction
since the team is expected to be empowered and self-organizing.
Scrum does not formally recognize the role of project manager
as traditional command to control tendencies would cause difficulties.
Workflow
Sprint. A sprint, also known as iteration or timebox, is the basic unit of development in scrum.
A sprint is a time-boxed effort, that is the length is agreed and fixed in advance for each sprint,
and is normally between one week and one month, with two weeks being the most common.
Each sprint starts with a sprint planning event in which a sprint goal is defined.
priorities for the upcoming sprint are chosen out of the backlog.
Each sprint ends with two events.
A sprint review, progress shown to stakeholders to elicit their feedback,
a sprint retrospective, identify lessons and improvements for the next sprints.
Scrum emphasizes valuable, actionable output at the end of the sprint that just was completed.
In the case of software, this likely includes that products are fully integrated, tested, and
documented and potentially releasable.
Sprint planning.
At the beginning of a sprint, the scrum team holds a sprint planning event.
To agree on the sprint goal, a short description of what they forecast to deliver by sprint
end based on the priorities set by the product owner, select product backlog items that
contribute towards this goal, form a sprint backlog by mutually discussing and agreeing on
which items are intended to be done during that sprint.
The maximum duration of sprint planning is eight hours for a four-week sprint.
As a detailed work is elaborated, some product backlog items may be split or return to the product backlog
if the team believes they cannot complete that work in a single sprint.
Daily scrum
Each day during a sprint, the developers hold a daily scrum sometimes conducted standing up with specific guidelines.
All developers come prepared.
The daily scrum is focused on inspecting progress towards the sprint goal.
Should happen at the same time and place every day.
Is limited time box to 15 minutes.
Is conducted however the team decides.
May include others, though only developers should speak.
May be facilitated by the scrum master.
May identify impediments to progress.
e.g. stumbling block, risk, issue, delayed dependency, assumption proved unfounded.
Does not feature discussions? It is not a means of updating progress charts.
No detailed discussions should happen during the Daily Scrum. Once over, individual members can discuss
issues in detail, often known as a breakout session or an after-party.
Blockers identified should be collectively discussed outside of the Daily Scrum with a
view to working toward a resolution.
Where the team does not see the value in this event, it is the responsibility of the scrum
master to determine why and educate the team and stakeholders about scrum principles,
or encourage the team to design their own method of keeping the team fully informed of
sprint progress.
Sprint review
Conducted at the end of a sprint, the team presents the completed work to the stakeholders,
aka the demo,
collaborates with stakeholders on topics such as inviting feedback about the completed product increment,
discussing the impact of incomplete work, planned, or otherwise,
receiving suggestions for upcoming work, guidance of what to work on next.
Product owners should see this event as a valuable opportunity to review
and refine the product backlog with stakeholders.
Guidelines for Sprint Reviews
incomplete work should not be demonstrated, although stakeholders should be presented with product increments they will be receiving, but can also request to see work in progress if necessary.
However, the team should only be prepared to show what has been done.
The recommended duration is two hours for a two-week sprint, proportional for other sprint durations.
Sprint retrospective
At the sprint retrospective, the team reflects in the past sprints.
inspects how the last sprint went, individuals, interactions, processes, tools, definition of done,
identifies and agrees on continuous process improvement actions.
Guidelines for sprint retrospectives
Three suggested areas to consider in sprint retrospectives are
What went well during the sprint? What did not go well?
What could we do differently the next sprint?
The duration is maximum of three hours for a four-week sprint, proportional for other sprint durations,
e.g. 1.5 hours for a 2-week sprint. The scrum master may facilitate this event, but they can also be
present just as part of the team. Backlog refinement. Although not originally a core scrum practice,
backlog refinement, formerly called grooming, was added to the scrum guide and adopted as a way of
managing the quality of product backlog items entering a sprint.
It is the ongoing process of reviewing and amending, updating,
reordering product backlog items in the light of new information.
Reasons for modifying the backlog and items within may include
larger items may be broken into multiple smaller ones.
Acceptance criteria may be clarified.
Dependencies may be identified and investigated.
An item may require for,
discovery and analysis. Priorities may have changed, expected returns will now differ.
Refinement means that items are appropriately prepared and ordered in a way that makes them clear and executable for developers for sprint planning.
The backlog can also include technical debt, also known as design debt or code debt.
This is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing
an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.
It is recommended to invest of up to 10% of a team's sprint capacity upon backlog refinement.
Most mature teams will not see this as a scheduled defined event but as an ad hoc activity
that forms part of the natural workflow, refining and adjusting the product backlog when needed.
Canceling a sprint.
The product owner can cancel a sprint if necessary.
and may do so with input from others, developers, scrum master, or management.
For example, recent external circumstances may negate the value of the sprint goal,
so it is pointless in continuing.
When a sprint is abnormally terminated,
the next step is to conduct new sprint planning
with a reason for the termination is reviewed.
Artifacts
Product Backlog
The product backlog is a breakdown of work to be done
and contains an ordered list of product requirements that the team maintains for a product.
Common formats for backlog items include user stories and use cases.
These requirements define features, bug fixes, non-functional requirements, etc.
Whatever delivers a viable product.
The product owner prioritizes product backlog items based on considerations such as risk,
business value, dependencies, size, and date needed.
The product backlog is what is needed, ordered by when it is needed, and is visible to everyone
that may only be changed with consent of the product owner, who is responsible for managing
and maintaining the product backlog items.
The product backlog contains the product owner's assessment of business value and may include
the team's assessment of effort or complexity.
often but not always stated in story points using the rounded Fibonacci scale.
These estimates help the product owner to gauge the timeline
and may influence the ordering of product backlog items.
For example, for two features with the same business value,
the product owner may schedule earlier delivery of work with the lower development effort
because the return on investment is higher,
or the one with higher development effort because it is more complex or riskier and they want to
retire that risk earlier. The product backlog and the business value of each product backlog
item is the responsibility of the product owner. The effort to deliver each item may be
estimated in story points or time. By estimating in story points, the team reduces the dependency
of individual developers. This is useful especially for dynamic teams where developers are often assigned
to other work after sprint delivery. For instance, if a user story is estimated at a five
in effort using Fibonacci sequence, it remains five regardless of how many developers are working on it.
Story points to find the effort in a time box so they do not change with time. For instance, in one
hour an individual can walk, run, or climb, but the effort expended is clearly different.
The gap progression between the terms in the Fibonacci sequence encourages the team to deliver
carefully considered estimates. Estimates of one, two, or three imply similar efforts,
one being trivial. But if the team estimates an eight or 13 or higher, the impact on both
delivery and budget can be significant.
The value of using story points is that the team can reuse them by comparing similar work
from previous sprints, but it should be recognized that estimates are relative to that team.
For example, an estimate of five for one team could be a two for another, composed of more
experienced developers with higher capability.
Every team should have a product owner, although in many instances, a product owner could work with more than one team.
The product owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product.
The product owner gathers input and takes feedback from and is lobbied by many people,
but ultimately has the final decision about what gets built.
The product backlog captures requests to modify a product, including new features,
replacing old features, removing features, and fixing issues,
ensures the developers have work that maximizes business benefit of the product.
Typically, the whole team works together to refine the product backlog,
which evolves as new information surfaces about the product and its customers,
and so later sprints may address new work.
Management.
A product backlog in its simplest form is merely a list of items to work on.
Having well-established rules about how work is added, removed, and ordered, helps the whole team make better decisions about how to change the product.
The product owner prioritizes product backlog items based on which are needed soonest.
Developers influenced by the Sprint goal choose items for coming Sprint, moving those items from the product backlog to the Sprint backlog, which is a list of items they will build.
conceptually the sprint goal is influenced by high priority items at the top of the list
but it is not unusual to see developers taking some lower priority items if there is time left
within the sprint to accommodate more work high priority items at the top of the backlog
should be broken down into more detail that are suitable for developers to work on
the further down the backlog the less detailed items will be as schwab
and Beetle put it, to lower the priority, the less detail until you can barely make out the
backlog item. As the team works through the backlog, it must be assumed that change happens
outside their environment. The team can learn about new market opportunities to take advantage of,
competitive threats that arise, and feedback from customers that can change the way the product
was meant to work. All of these new ideas tend to trigger the team to adapt the backlog to incorporate
new knowledge. This is part of the fundamental mindset of an agile team. The world changes,
the backlog is never finished. Sprint backlog. The sprint backlog is the subset of items from
the product backlog intended for developers to address in the upcoming sprint. Developers will fill this
backlog until they feel they have enough work to fill the sprint, using past performance to assess capacity
for the next sprint, using this as a guideline of how much effort they can complete.
Work on the sprint backlog is never assigned or pushed to developers.
Team members pull work as needed according to the backlog priority and their own skills and capacity.
This promotes self-organization of the developers.
The sprint backlog is the property of the developers,
and all included estimates are provided by the developers.
Although not part of scrum, some teams use an accompanying board to visualize the state of work in the current sprint.
To do, doing, done.
Increment
The increment is the potentially releasable output of the sprint that meets the sprint goal.
It is formed from all the completed sprint backlog items integrated with the work of all previous sprints.
The increment must be complete, according to the scrum team's definition of done,
fully functioning, and in a usable condition regardless of whether the product owner decides to actually deploy and use it.
Extensions
The following artifacts and techniques can be used to help people use Scrum.
Burndown chart
Often used in Scrum but not part of Scrum.
A burn down chart is a publicly displayed chart showing remaining work.
Updated every day it provides quick visualization for reference.
The horizontal axis of the burn-down chart shows the days remaining,
while the vertical axis shows the amount of work remaining each day.
During sprint planning, the ideal burn-down chart is plotted.
Then during the sprint, developers update the chart with remaining work
so the chart is updated day by day, showing a comparison between actual and predicted.
Should not be confused with an earned value chart.
Release Burn Up chart.
The release burn-up chart is a way for the team to provide visibility and track progress toward a release.
Updated at the end of each sprint, it shows progress toward delivering a forecast scope.
The horizontal axis of the release burn-up chart shows the sprint in a release,
while the vertical axis shows the amount of work completed at the end of each sprint,
typically representing cumulative story points of work completed.
Progress is plotted as a line that grows up to meet a horse.
horizontal line that represents the forecast scope, often shown with a forecast based on progress
to date that indicates how much scope might be completed by a given release date or how many
sprints it will take to complete the given scope. The release burn-up chart makes it easy to see
how much work has been completed, how much work has been added or removed if the horizontal
scope line moves, and how much work is left to be done. Definition
of Ready. The start criteria to determine whether the specifications and inputs are set clearly
enough to start the work item. Definition of Done. The exit criteria to determine whether work
on sprint backlog item is complete. For example, the definition of done requires that all regression
tests be successful. The definition of done may vary from one team to another, but must be
consistent within one team. Velocity.
team's total capability effort for a single sprint, derived by evaluating work completed in the
last sprint. The collection of historical velocity data is a guideline for assisting the team
in understanding their capacity, i.e. how much work they can comfortably achieve. This metric has
attracted controversy in the scrum community. Story points consume does not equal value delivered.
The team may see work done and ignore deliverable benefits to stakeholders.
Introduction of distracting practices, estimation versus actuals, variance, investigation, and policy of re-estimations begin to rise.
Management sees velocity as a performance metric, so seeks to increase it, meaning quality suffers.
The team begins to cut corners to include the added workload.
Morale suffers.
The team are unable to work at a comfortable, sustainable pace, and increased pressure causes burnout.
Estimation suffers. Developers will inflate estimates to build in buffers and gain the metrics, measuring the same effort on a different scale.
Value suffers. The end effect is interference that causes stakeholder dissatisfaction as a result of switching focus away from business value delivery.
Whilst there is value in understanding a team's delivery capacity, velocity should be considered an indicator for the team and not a dial that can be adjusted.
A time-boxed period used to research a concept or create a simple prototype.
Spikes can either be planned to take place in between sprints,
or for larger teams, a spike might be accepted as one of many sprint delivery objectives.
Spikes are often introduced before the delivery of large or complex product backlog items
in order to secure budget, expand knowledge, or produce a pre-rength,
or produce a proof of concept.
The duration and objectives of a spike are agreed by the team before the start.
Unlike sprint commitments, spikes may or may not deliver tangible, shippable, valuable functionality.
For example, the objective of a spike might be to successfully reach a decision on a course of action.
The spike is over when the time is up, not necessarily when the objective has been delivered.
Tracer Bullet
Also called a drone spike
A tracer bullet is a spike with the current architecture,
current technology set,
current set of best practices that result in production quality code.
It might just be a very narrow implementation of the functionality,
but is not throwaway code.
It is of production quality,
and the rest of the iterations can build on this code.
The name has military origin,
as ammunition that makes the path of the bullet visible, allowing for corrections.
Often these implementations are a quick shot through all layers of an application,
such as connecting a single forms input field to the back end
to prove the layers connect as expected.
Limitations
The benefits of scrum may be more difficult to achieve
when teams whose members are geographically dispersed or part-time.
In scrum, developers should have close and ongoing interaction, ideally working together in the same space most of the time.
While recent improvements in technology have reduced the impact of these barriers, e.g. being able to collaborate on a digital whiteboard, the Agile Manifesto asserts that the best communication is face-to-face.
Teams whose members have very specialized skills.
In scrum, developers should have T-shaped skills.
allowing them to work on tasks outside of their specialization.
This can be encouraged by good scrum leadership,
while team members with very specific skills can and do contribute well,
they should be encouraged to learn more about and collaborate with other disciplines.
Products with many external dependencies
and scrum dividing product development into short sprints requires careful planning.
External dependencies such as user access,
acceptance testing, or coordination with other teams can lead to delays in the failure of individual
sprints. Products that are mature or legacy or with regulated quality control. In Scrum,
product increments should be fully developed and tested in a single sprint. Products that need
large amounts of regression testing or safety testing, e.g. medical devices or vehicle control,
for each release, are less suited to short sprints than to longer waterfills.
fall releases. Tools available. Like other agile approaches, effective adoption of Scrum can be
supported through, but not dependent upon, a wide range of tools available. Many companies use
universal tools such as spreadsheets to build and maintain a sprint backlog. There are also open source
and proprietary software packages which use scrum terminology for product development, or support multiple
product development approaches including scrum. Other organizations implement scrum without software tools
and maintain their artifacts in hard copy forms such as paper, whiteboards, and sticky notes.
Scrum values
Scrum is a feedback-driven empirical approach, which is like all empirical process control,
underpinned by the three pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation. All work was in the
Scrum framework should be visible to those responsible for the outcome, the process, the workflow,
progress, etc. In order to make these things visible, scrum teams need to frequently inspect the
product being developed and how well the team is working. With frequent inspection, the team can
spot when their work deviates outside of acceptable limits and adapt their process or the product
under development.
These three pillars require trust and openness in the team,
which the following five values of scrum enable.
One, commitment.
Team members individually commit to achieving their team goals each and every sprint.
Two, courage.
Team members know they have the courage to work through conflict and challenges together
so that they can do the right thing.
Three, focus.
Team members focus exclusively on their team goals and the sprint backlog.
There should be no work done other than through their backlog.
Four, openness.
Team members and their stakeholders agree to be transparent about their work and any challenges they face.
Five, respect.
Team members respect each other to be technically capable and to work with good intent.
Adaptations
Scrum is used in a variety.
of context to achieve many different aims.
To accomplish those varying ends, scrum is frequently tailored or adapted.
A common approach to adapting scrum is a hybridization of scrum with other software development
methodologies as scrum does not cover the whole product development lifecycle.
Therefore, organizations find the need to add in additional processes to create a more
comprehensive implementation.
For example, at the start of product development,
organizations commonly add process guidance on the business case,
requirements gathering and prioritization,
initial high-level design,
and budget and schedule forecasting.
Various authors and communities of people who use scrum
have also suggested more detailed techniques for how to apply
or adapt scrum to particular problems or organizations.
Many refer to these methodological techniques as patterns,
by analogy the design patterns in architecture and software.
ScrumBahn
ScrumBahn is a software production model based on Scrum and Conbon.
ScrumBon is especially suited for product maintenance
with frequent and unexpected work items,
such as production defects or programming errors.
In such cases, the time-limited sprints of the Scrum framework
may be perceived to be of less benefit, although scrum's daily events and other practices can still be
applied, depending on the team and the situation at hand. Visualization of the work stages and
limitations for simultaneous unfinished work and defects are familiar from the Conbonne model.
Using these methods, the team's workflow is directed in a way that allows for minimum completion
time for each work item or programming error, and on the other hand ensures each team member is
constantly employed. To illustrate each stage of work, teams working in the same space often use
post-it notes or a large whiteboard. In the case of decentralized teams, stage illustration software
such as Assembla, Jira, or Agilo can be used.
The major differences between Scrum and Conbon
is that in Scrum work is divided into sprints
that last a fixed amount of time,
whereas in Conbon the flow of work is continuous.
This is visible in work stage stables
which in scrum are emptied after each sprint,
whereas in Conbon all tasks are marked on the same table.
Scrum focuses on teams with multifaceted know-how,
whereas Conbon makes specialized functional teams possible.
Scrum of Scrum's
The Scrum of Scrums is a technique to operate scrum at scale
for multiple teams working on the same product,
allowing them to discuss progress on their interdependencies,
focusing on how to coordinate delivering software,
especially on areas of overlap and integration.
Depending on the cadence, timing of the scrum of scrums,
the relevant daily scrum for each scrum team ends by designating one member as an ambassador
to participate in the scrum of scrums with ambassadors from other teams.
The relevant daily scrum for each scrum team ends by designating one member as an ambassador
to participate in the scrum of scrums with ambassadors from other teams.
depending on the context the ambassadors may be technical contributors or each team's scrum master.
Rather than simply a progress update, the Scrum of Scrum should focus on how teams are collectively working to resolve, mitigate,
or accept any risks, impediments, dependencies, and assumptions RIDAs that have been identified.
The Scrum of Scrum tracks these RIDAs,
via a backlog of its own, such as a risk board, sometimes known as a Rome board,
after the initials of resolved, own, accepted, and mitigated,
which typically leads to greater coordination and collaboration between teams.
This should run similar to a daily scrum,
with each ambassador answering the following four questions.
What risks, impediments, dependencies, or assumptions
has your team resolved since we last met?
What risks, impediments, dependencies, or assumptions will your team resolve before we meet again?
Are there any new risks, impediments, dependencies, or assumptions, slowing your team down or getting in their way?
Are you about to introduce a new risk, impediment, dependency, or assumption that will get in another team's way?
As Jeff Sutherland commented, since I originally defined the scrum of scrums, Ken Schwabber was at IDX,
working with me. I can definitely say the scrum of scrums is not a meta-scrum. The scrum of scrums,
as I have used it, is responsible for delivering the working software of all teams to the
definition of done at the end of the sprint, or for release during the sprint. Patient Keeper
delivered the production four times per sprint. Ancestry.com delivers to production 220 times per two-week
Sprint. HubSpot delivers live software 100 to 300 times a day. The Scrum of Scrum's master is held
accountable for making this work, so the Scrum of Scrums is an operational delivery mechanism.
Large-scale Scrum. Large-scale scrum, less, is a production development process that extends
scrum with scaling rules and guidelines without losing the original purpose of scrum.
There are two levels to the framework.
The first less level is designed for up to eight teams.
The second level, known as Less Huge, introduces additional scaling elements for development
with up to hundreds of developers.
Scaling scrum starts with understanding and being able to adopt standard real one-team scrum.
Large-scale scrum requires examining the purpose of single-team scrum elements,
and figuring out how to reach the same purpose while staying within the constraints of the standard scrum rules.
Bosvod and Craig Larman evolved the less framework from their experiences working with large-scale product development,
especially in the telecoms and finance industries.
It evolved by taking scrum and trying many different experiments to discover what works.
In 2013, the experiments were solidified into the less framework rules.
intention of less is to de-scale organization complexity,
dissolving unnecessary complex organizational solutions,
and solving them in simpler ways.
Less roles, less management, less organizational structures.
Criticisms
Scrum has come under fire many times,
mainly by those applying concepts poorly,
yet expecting the same results,
or misunderstanding cultural changes that Scrum
scrum acquires. Scrum events have been reported to be hurting productivity and wasting time that could be
better spent on actual productive tasks, usually caused by a misunderstanding of the events, purpose,
and goal, so as conducted as an overlong thorough meeting rather than a brief timebox discussion.
Scrum practices, when not correctly followed in the spirit of the Agile Manifesto, have a tendency
to become a form of micromanagement and reintroduce the same dysfunction that the practices
sought to remove. Scrum also assumes that effort required for completing work can be accurately
estimated, although frequently this can be quite unpredictable. Scrum deliberately omits prescriptive
practices to encourage freedom of empirical analysis and experimentation. Scrum is perceived to be a
form of rather than an alternative approach to managing projects. An initial foray into scrum will not
produce high quality results immediately. Impatience rob scrum of the chance to embed and grow.
Common dysfunctional approaches to scrum have now been recognized as anti-patterns, including dark scrum and scream.
