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Gustavo Isensee
Gustavo Isensee

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🔨 Scrum in a very short story!

Are you a little tired of all those huge explanation about Scrum? well then, this text is for you.
Here I have summarised what scrum is, its main events and tools, roles and responsibilities.

🧰 Let's get started with, What's Scrum?

  • Scrum is a framework that helps teams work together.
  • It focus on incremental delivers and helps to generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems.
  • Scrum encourages teams to learn through experiences, self-organize while working on a problem, and reflect on their wins and losses to continuously improve.
  • With scrum, a product is built in a series of iterations called sprints that break down big, complex projects into bite-sized pieces.
  • Scrum pillars:
    • Transparency: work must be visible to those performing the work as well as those receiving the work. it enables inspection.
    • Inspection: the work needs to be inspect to detect potential issues. it enables adaptation.
    • Adaptation: if the work is out of acceptable, adaptation are required as soon as possible to minimize further deviation.
  • Scrum values:
    • Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect and Courage
  • Scrum mechanisms/events/tools consist on:
    • Backlog
    • Sprint (usually 1 month cycle or less)
    • Sprint planning (sprint start)
    • Daily meetings also known as stand-ups
    • Sprint review (demo)
    • Retrospective

🪣 What’s a backlog?

  • A product backlog is a prioritised list of work for the development team that is derived from the roadmap and its requirements.
  • Product owner is responsible for prioritise, organize and define it, with the help of scrum master and the development team.

📅 What’s a Sprint?

  • A sprint is a short, time-boxed period when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work.
  • They’re usually time-boxed in 1 month or less (on my team we do 2 weeks).

📃 What’s Sprint planning?

  • Sprint planning is an event in scrum that kicks off the sprint.
  • Define what can be delivered in the sprint and how that work will be achieved.
  • It is done in collaboration with the whole scrum team.

🤝🏻 What are Daily meetings / Stand-ups

  • Daily meetings as they name suggests, are very short meetings to share some issues, blockers and possible highlights, try not to dive too much in details here.
  • It keeps the team informed, connected, and calibrated throughout the sprint.
  • Also kwon as daily scrum, and reinforces “we” to keep everyone aware of the team’s landscape and progress.
  • Try to keep it simple, what did you do yesterday, doing today and if there’s any blocker.

✨ What’s Sprint review?

  • A sprint review is about demonstrating the hard work of the entire team.
  • Team members gather around a desk for informal demos and describe the work they’ve done for that iteration.
  • Sharing in success is an important part of building an agile team.

🏢 What’s Retrospective

  • A retrospective is anytime your team reflects on the past to improve the future.
  • Basically a meeting to reflect about what has been good, bad and improvements for the future.

🫂 Building up a Scrum team

Scrum team should be composed of 3 main roles:

  • Development (Designers, Architect, Developers, Writes and etc)
  • Scrum master
  • Product Owner

🧑‍💻 Development

The development team should be able to self-organize so they can make decisions to get work done.

The development team’s responsibilities are:

  • Delivering the work through the sprint.
  • Ensure transparency during the daily meetings.
    • Daily meetings provide a dedicated place for team members to seek help, talk about success and highlight issues and blockers.
  • Attend to meeting and contribute with ideas and/or solutions.

🦮 Scrum Master

The scrum master is the role responsible for gluing everything together and ensuring that scrum is being done well.

  • Helps the product owner define value
  • Helps the product owner to better understand and communicate value, to manage the backlog, help them plan the work with the team and break it down.
  • Helps the development team to self-organize, focus on outcomes, get to a “done increment,” and manage blockers.
  • Helps the organization to understand what scrum is and create an environment that supports scrum.

Some of the scrum master’s responsibilities are:

  • Facilitate (scrum meetings in general)
  • Transparency
  • Self organization
  • Protecting the team
  • Empiricism
  • Scrum values
  • Remove blockers

🙂 Product Owner

The owner of the product has lots of decisions to make and lots of responsibilities, including:

  • Setting a clear goal for the sprint
  • Ensure that they are delivering the most value
  • Managing stakeholders expectation
  • Managing the scrum backlog
  • And he/she should not only understand the customer, but also have a vision for the value the scrum team is delivering to the customer.

Some sources

This is what I have to share so far, I might be increment it a little bit here and there in the near future.
Another thing I'd like to add, is that on my team currently we also have a meeting called refinements.

  • Refinements (technical or not), are important when the proposed solution made by PO and UX might lack on details or how to achieve that, on these meetings we try to include the whole scrum team to discuss better how we can achieve that goal.

I hope you have enjoyed it! have a great week!

Cheers

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