What is SCRUM?
Scrum is not a methodology, it is a framework. This means that Scrum won't tell you exactly what to do, but rather it will serve as a "path" to help you achieve your goal.
- SCRUM has 3 basic roles:
Scrum Master: The guardian of the process. Responsible for ensuring the process runs smoothly by removing obstacles that hinder the team's productivity, organizing, and facilitating meetings. It is essential for the Scrum Master to have a deep understanding of Scrum.
Product Owner: The central figure with leadership authority over the product. Decides which products and features will be developed and in what order. It's their responsibility to communicate to the participants what the Scrum team aims to achieve in the project, and they prioritize the items in the Product Backlog.
Development team: Comprises all developers and other professionals directly involved in the product's development. They hold a role in Scrum just as important as the others, as they are responsible for turning the project into reality.
"Build the right thing. Build it the right way. Build it fast."
Scrum Principles
Empirical process control: Observation and experimentation. Through transparency, inspection, and adaptation, the process is carried out flexibly.
Self-organization: Everyone is responsible for the project.
Collaboration: No one has climbed Mount Everest alone.
Value-based prioritization: Focus on delivering the most valuable items to the client.
Timebox: There is no flexibility with deadlines. A sprint can last from 1 to 4 weeks; if something cannot be delivered, it goes to the next sprint. This avoids the "student's theorem"—if you give someone 4 hours to complete a task, they will procrastinate for 3 hours and finish it in the last hour. Therefore, it’s crucial to set boundaries. Meetings are limited to 15-20 minutes.
Iteration and increment: Scrum focuses on value delivery. Its stages repeat through sprints, and the results are incrementally based on the client's highest needs.
- Basic Scrum Events
Daily meetings
Sprint planning
Sprint execution
Sprint review
Retrospective
Daily Meetings
Every day, there are meetings of approximately 15 minutes where each team member must answer three basic questions:
What did I do yesterday to help the team reach the sprint goal?
What will I do today to achieve the sprint goal?
Is there any impediment preventing me or the team from reaching the goal?
Product Backlog
It's a list of functionalities ordered by priority by the product owner. It's made up of short statements that describe part of the user's problem. These statements are called user stories. A Product Backlog consists of at least the following fields:
User story: Describes a desired functionality of the project.
Importance: Describes how important the user story is.
Estimate: Describes how difficult the user story is for the team to implement.
- How to create a product backlog?
Scrum doesn't tell us how to create a product backlog, only that we must have one. However, to make it easier, here are some steps for its creation:
- Understand the partner's problem
- Write the user stories
- Relate the user stories
- Prioritize the user stories
- Estimate the difficulty of the user stories
This is one of the most challenging stages of a project. To do this, we can use the following techniques:
- Interviews
- Questionnaires
- Observation
- Prototyping
- Investigation
- User journey
- Other techniques to understand the partner's/client's problem
- Paper Prototyping
To help understand the user, a very good technique is Paper Prototyping (Drawing a prototype on paper). This is a brainstorming, design, creation, communication, and interface testing technique that uses paper and pen to understand user needs. This technique can be used to design websites, software, mobile devices, and hardware.
Sprints
A Sprint is a time period during which one or more items from the product backlog are selected to be developed and delivered to stakeholders in order to add value to the project. It is important for sprints to follow a predefined timebox, typically lasting between 1 to 4 weeks, depending on what is set as the final product.
What happens in each day of the Sprint
Before the start of a sprint, a sprint planning meeting is held based on what needs to be delivered as the final product. This meeting is called "release planning" or "sprint planning," where the sprint backlog is created. Based on the team's capacity, it is determined how many features can be fully developed within the sprint timeframe. A method that can be used for this is Planning Poker.
Planning Poker Cards
Planning Poker works as follows: the development group meets to discuss the candidate user stories to be selected for development in the current sprint. The team members each draw a card with a number that represents the difficulty they perceive in developing that feature— the lower the number, the less complex; the higher the number, the more complex. The team members who played the lowest and highest cards are selected to speak, and they seek to reach a consensus on the difficulty of that user story. This ensures that everyone is involved in the development process and also makes it more agile.
It’s important to note that these features follow the level of importance recorded by the product owner in the product backlog. At the end of the sprint, there are two additional key activities:
Sprint review: This is a meeting held right after the end of a sprint cycle, with the product owner present to validate whether the product being delivered meets their needs.
Sprint Retrospective: This is a meeting with only the development team members to evaluate the pros and cons of the development cycle in question.
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