Agile SCRUM Methodology

In few days back I have outlined points Agile values & it’s key principles in “Agile Manifesto and Principles” article. Today we’ll talk about commonly used process for agile software development i.e. Agile Scrum. Before start post let me tell you one thing that I always like to share practical knowledge, which can be useful to users in their career life.

What is Scrum?

Scrum is an innovative approach to getting work done in efficient way. It is iterative & incremental agile software development method. These iterations are time boxed with various iterations & each iteration is called Sprint. The Sprint is basically 2-4 week long & each sprint requires sprint planning estimation. According to latest surveys Scrum is the most popular agile project management methodology in software development. The term Scrum is formed from Rugby.

Scrum is ideally used where highly emergent or rapidly changing requirements. Scrum is basically worked on a self-organizing, cross-functional team. In the overall scrum team there is no team leader who assign the task to team rather whole scrum members work as a team & they decides the task on which they will work on. Also the problem will be resolve by team.

Each Agile Development Scrum team having three core scrum roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master & The Team.

1) Product Owner: The Product Owner is the person who represents the stakeholders and is the voice of the customer. Product owner writes the User Stories, ordered priorities and add in the Product Backlog. It is recommended that Agile Scrum Master should not mix with Product Owner; both members should be different as each member having its own responsibilities.

2) Scrum Master: The ScrumMaster is a facilitative team leader who ensures that the team adheres to its chosen process and removes blocking issues to deliver the sprint deliverable/goal. Scrum Master is not a team leader but act as a shield for the team from external interference’s & also removes barriers. ScrumMaster facilitates the daily scrums.

3) The Team: The scrum development team is generally size of 5-9 peoples with self-organizing and cross-functional skills who do actual work like Analysis, Design, Development, Testing, Documentation etc.

In the start of every Scrum Sprint, the team members are committed to delivering few tasks from Scrum Product backlog. Over the sprint timeboxed the team work on developing, testing, integrating feature & end of the Sprint in the Sprint Review Meeting these functionality demoed to Product Owner & interested Stakeholders. In this meeting they can give feedback if any on developed product which could influence the next sprint.

The main artifact in the Agile Scrum project is the product itself. The team is working efficiently on product to deliver shippable product after end of every sprint. The Product Backlog is place where all requirements are ordered and written in the user story format. These user stories are ordered & prioritized by Product Owner based on risk, business value, date needed, dependencies etc so that most valuable features picked in Sprint first.

In the market lots of paid and Free scrum software available, iceScrum is one of the free platform for your agile developments, where the best of both Kanban and Scrum are proposed in iceScrum.