To implement the scrum development process, it is important
to know how it actually works. Most of the errors in the development occur
because of the lack of knowledge about the working process of the scrum.
Scrum works on the principle of iterative and incremental development and
it operates with the help of two types of roles namely:
- Core roles:
(i)
Scrum master
(ii)
Development team
(iii)
Product owner
- Ancillary
roles:
(i)
Stake holders and
(ii)
Managers
What is a scrum process?
- The scrum process deals in terms of sprints which are usually
called iterations for the other agile software development processes.
- In a
typical scrum, a sprint may have duration of a week to a month.
- Scrum is
facilitated by various meetings which have been mentioned below:
1. Daily
scrum:
This meeting is held during the sprint and is based up on the
project status. Usually the core roles participate in this meeting. This
meeting is time boxed to 15 minutes.
2. Story time
(back log grooming):
This process involves the estimation of the existing
backlog and the acceptance criteria for the user stories is also refined.
These meetings are time boxed to an hour.
3. Scrum of
scrums:
This meeting follows after daily scrum and is somewhat same.
4. Sprint
planning meeting:
This meeting is held before the beginning of every
sprint and the tasks that have to be completed within that sprint are
selected.
5. Sprint
review meeting:
It reviews the status of the sprint and also the tasks
that could not be completed.
Principles on which working of scrum depends
The scrum follows the following three principles throughout
its working:
- Working
software is more valuable then the documentation.
- Response to
the changes in requirements is more important than the plan.
- Team
collaboration is important than contract negotiation.
How does a scrum process work?
- Usually the first few weeks of the scrum are spent working
out the high level requirements including business needs and system
architecture.
- After this, the team produces the product backlog and sprint
backlog.
- These two backlogs together make the scope of the software project by
the end of the week. - All the team member themselves take up the
responsibilities and operational activities from each other during the daily
meetings.
- At the end of some sprints, it happens that some of the tasks could
not be completed as planned so they have to be included in the next sprint in
addition to the other tasks.
- One of the reasons for such situations is the
“scope creep”.
- However, this does not turns out to be a real issue especially
when the team is working closely with the business owners who have good
understanding of the development process going on.
- It should be understood that
the scrum is a framework rather than just being a full methodology.
- A detail of
everything that is to be done is not provided by the client since it is decided
by the team itself.
- At the end of the sprints the coding, testing, integration
of the features is done.
- In the sprint review, the newly added features to the
software are demonstrated to the product owner.
Reasons why scrum works well
There are several reasons why
scrum works and few of them have been mentioned below:
- Iterative
nature.
- Re
assessment of priorities between iterations.
- The old
check points are discarded when the team is doing something new.
- Availability
of the product owner.
- The
development team works on a single project at a time.
- The team
has a chance to co- locate the entire development process.
