Enhance Productivity with Scrum

Rohit Bhardwaj, Principal Software Engineer, Kronos Incorporated

Scrum is a agile development framework which 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, ScrumMaster and Team. The

ScrumMaster acts as a facilitator or a coach for the team helping to resolve

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 problem 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 and help 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. He 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.  Other artifact is

the spring burn down chart & 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 to

synchronize work & help in resolving problems occured.