What is Scrum?
Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing product development. It defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal", challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach" to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.
A key principle of scrum is its recognition that during production processes, the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements volatility), 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, to respond to emerging requirements and to adapt to evolving technologies and changes in market conditions.
Roles in Scrum
There are three core roles in the scrum framework. These core roles are collocated to deliver Potentially Shippable Increment (PSI) by adopting scrum framework—they are the ones producing the product (objective of the project). They represent the scrum team. Although other roles may be encountered in real projects, scrum does not define any team roles other than those described below.
Product owner
The product owner represents the stakeholders and is the voice of the customer, who is accountable for ensuring that the team delivers value to the business. The product owner writes customer-centric items (typically user stories), ranks and prioritizes them, and adds them to the product backlog. Scrum teams should have one product owner, this role should not be combined with that of the scrum master. The product owner should focus on the business side of the project and spend majority of time to liaise with stakeholders and should not interfere or interact with team members on the technical solution aspects of the development task. This role is equivalent to the customer representative role in some other agile frameworks such as Extreme Programming (XP).
Communication is a main function of the product owner. The ability to convey priorities and empathize with team members and stakeholders is vital to steer the project in the right direction. Product owners bridge the communication gap between the team and its stakeholders. As Figure 1 shows, they serve as a proxy stakeholder to the development team and as a project 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:
- demonstrates the solution to key stakeholders who were not present at a sprint review;
- defines and announces releases;
- communicates team status;
- organizes milestone reviews;
- educates stakeholders in the development process;
- negotiates priorities, scope, funding, and schedule;
- ensures that the product backlog is visible, transparent, and clear.
Empathy is a key attribute for a product owner to have the ability to put one’s self in another’s shoes. A product owner converses with different stakeholders in the project, who have a variety of backgrounds, job roles, and objectives. A product owner must be able to see from 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 development team needs 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. There is also significant evidence that face-to-face communication around a shared sketching environment is the most effective way to communicate information instead of documentation. A direct means of communication is the most preferred by seasoned agile 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.
Development team
The development team is responsible for delivering potentially shippable increments (PSIs) of product at the end of each sprint (the sprint goal). A team is made up of 3–9 individuals who do the actual work (analyse, design, develop, test, technical communication, document, etc.). Development teams are cross-functional, with all of the skills as a team necessary to create a product increment. The development team in scrum is self-organizing, even though there may be some level of interface with project management offices (PMOs).
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 buffer between the team and any distracting influences. The scrum master ensures that the scrum process is used as intended. The scrum master helps ensure the team follows the agreed scrum processes, often facilitates key sessions, and encourages the team 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
- Promoting self-organization within the team
- Helping the scrum team to avoid or remove impediments to its progress, whether internal or external to the team
- Facilitating team events to ensure regular progress
- Educating key stakeholders in the product on scrum principles
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. Scrum does not formally recognise the role of project manager, as traditional command and control tendencies would cause difficulties.
Sprint
A sprint (or iteration) is the basic unit of development in scrum. The sprint is a timeboxed effort; that is, it is restricted to a specific duration. The duration is 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 that aims to define a sprint backlog, identify the work for the sprint, and make an estimated commitment for the sprint goal. Each sprint ends with a sprint review and sprint retrospective, that reviews progress to show to stakeholders and identify lessons and improvements for the next sprints.
Scrum emphasizes working product at the end of the sprint that is really done. In the case of software, this likely includes that the software has been integrated, fully tested, end-user documented, and is potentially shippable.
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