Fond of Rugby? Then Scrum would be a recognizable term for you. The scrummage arrangement of rugby players works similar to that of the Scrum team. Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in the mid 80’s defined a flexible and all-inclusive product development strategy where the development team works as a unit to reach a common…
Business justification demonstrates the reasons for undertaking a project. It answers the question “Why is this project needed?” Business justification drives all decision making related to a project. So, it is important to assess the viability and achievability of a project not only before committing to significant expenditures or investment at initial stages of the…
Stakeholder(s) is a collective term that includes customers, users, and sponsors, who frequently interface with the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Scrum Team to provide them with inputs and facilitate creation of the project’s product, service, or other result. Stakeholder(s) influence the project throughout the project’s development. Thus it is important to understand the risk…
Scrum Teams—often referred to as development teams and responsible for the development of products and services—consist of a group of individuals who work on customer requirements to create deliverables for the project. It is important for the team to possess all the essential skills to carry out the work in the project. The optimum size…
Scrum supports the practice of using cross-functional, self-managed teams in which individuals help each other in completing tasks to deliver value. The SBOK™ Guide says that employees “deliver much greater value when self-organized.” Self-Organization encourages team members into taking ownership, being entrepreneurial, and contributing the best that they genuinely can. So Scrum discourages appraisal methods like Stacked…
Scrum Masters are responsible for ensuring a conducive environment for the Scrum Team to develop products at high velocity. Prior to Sprint planning, the Product Owner needs to prioritize the User Stories in the Prioritized Product Backlog. Once the User Stories are prioritized, the Product Owner and the Scrum Master need to determine if the…
The daily Stand-up or Scrum meeting is a daily meeting which provides a status update to all the team members. Every member focuses on answering three statements: Task Completed Task to be done Road Blocks It’s very powerful tool and it keeps the project moving in the planned direction. If the team does not follow…
Being an Agile approach, Scrum is highly flexible (pun, probably intended); that is, it can be stretched and bent to fit any project’s requirements. It is best suited for projects that require splitting a huge and an unplanned project into manageable chunks of work based on business priorities. As such, it can be used for…
In Scrum relative values are usually used for story points estimation instead of absolute values. This approach makes it simple to create estimates while facing uncertain situations. With experience and time, Scrum teams will develop the capability to sharpen their estimates for more precision. They can figure out the number of story points that can…
Out of several estimation techniques involved in Scrum, few are noted below. 1- Wideband Delphi 2- Relative sizing / Story Points. 3- Affinity Estimation. 4- Estimate Range. Wideband Delphi Wideband Delphi is a group-based estimation technique for determining how much work is involved and how long it will take to complete. Individuals within a team…
