Agile Scrum Methodology

What is Scrum ?

Scrum and agile are not same things. Actually, scrum is a framework for getting work done, where agile is a mindset.

Scrum is a framework that helps teams work together. It is most frequently used by software development teams, its principles and lessons can be applied to all kinds of teamwork. This is one of the reasons scrum is so popular. Often thought of as an agile project management framework, scrum describes a set of meetings, tools, and roles that work in concert to help teams structure and manage their work.

Scrum Roles :

There are three scrum roles -

• 1. Product Owner : Role of product owner -
  Define the feature of the product,
  Prioritize feature according to market value,
  Adjust features and priority as needed,
  Accepts or reject work results.

• 2. Scrum Master : The scrum master is the facilitator for agile development team. As the facilitator-in-chief, he/she schedules the needed resources (both human and logistical) for sprint planning, stand-up, sprint review, and the sprint retrospective.

• 3. Team : The team comprises of persons who work on the project. It can be developers, testers or designers.

Scrum Artifacts :

Following are the artifacts of scrum -

• 1. Product Backlog : It contains the requirements from customer. Requirements means they are in the form of Epic and Story. It is prepared by Product owner.

• 2. Sprint Backlog : It contains committed number of stories for specific sprint. The `n` number of sprint backlogs is equal to the 1 product backlog.

• 3. Burndown chart : Burndown chart is the outcome of the sprint, which shows the progress in a sprint. After each sprint, we need to examine the progress of each sprint. It shows how much work remaining in the sprint. It is done to track our activity.

Scrum/Agile Ceremonies :

• Grooming Meeting : This meeting will conducted before the start of sprint, if there are any issue/doubt related to understand the user stories.

• Sprint Planning Meeting : In sprint planning, we discuss what we are going to do in a sprint. In sprint planning, product owner discusses about each feature of a product and estimates the effort involved by the development team.

• Scrum Meeting/Daily Standup Meeting : This meeting is conducted everyday for 15 minutes by scrum master. Meeting consists of scrum master, developers, testers, designers, product owner, the client. Where product owner and client are optional.
  Scrum master asks the questions -
  1. What did you do yesterday?
  2. What will you do today?
  3. Are there any roadblocks?

• Sprint Review Meeting : After the completion of each sprint, the meeting is conducted with a client in which a product is shown to the client for demo and team discuss the features they added in the project.

• Sprint Retrospective Meeting : This meeting is conduct only once after complition of sprint. Entire team along with product owner and scrum master is present in this meeting. What went well, what went wrong and what are the improvements we have to do in the upcoming sprint, this will be discussed in this meeting.

Scrum Terminologies :

• User Story : User stories are requirement. It is a tool that is used in agile software development and product management to represent the smallest unit of work in the framework. It contains Description and Acceptance criteria.

• Epic : Epic is a collection of user stories.

• Sprint : It is a period of time to complete a user stories, decided by product owner and team. Usually sprint is of 2-4 weeks.

• Story Point : It is a rough estimation of user stories.