History[edit]
Scrum was first defined as "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal" as opposed to a "traditional, sequential approach" in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi andIkujiro Nonaka in the "New New Product Development Game".[2] Takeuchi and Nonaka later argued in "The Knowledge Creating Company"[3] that it is a form of "organizational knowledge creation, [...] especially good at bringing about innovation continuously, incrementally and spirally".
The authors described a new approach to commercial product development that would increase speed and flexibility, based on case studies from manufacturing firms in the automotive, photocopier and printer industries.[4] They called this the holistic or rugby approach, as the whole process is performed by one cross-functional team across multiple overlapping phases, where the team "tries to go the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth".[4]
In rugby football, a scrum refers to the manner of restarting the game after a minor infraction. In the early 1990s, Ken Schwaber used what would become Scrum at his company, Advanced Development Methods, and Jeff Sutherland, with John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna, developed a similar approach at Easel Corporation, and were the first to refer to it using the single word Scrum.[5]
In 1995, Sutherland and Schwaber jointly presented a paper describing the Scrum methodology at the Business Object Design and Implementation Workshop held as part of Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications '95 (OOPSLA '95) in Austin, Texas, its first public presentation.[6] Schwaber and Sutherland collaborated during the following years to merge the above writings, their experiences, and industry best practices into what is now known as Scrum.
In 2001, Schwaber worked with Mike Beedle to describe the method in the book Agile Software Development with Scrum.[7]
Its approach to planning and managing projects is to bring decision-making authority to the level of operation properties and certainties.[8]
Although the word is not an acronym, some companies implementing the process have been known to spell it with capital letters as SCRUM. This may be due to one of Ken Schwaber's early papers, which capitalized SCRUM in the title.[8]
Hybridization of scrum is common as scrum does not cover the whole product development lifecycle; therefore, organizations find the need to add in additional processes to create a more comprehensive implementation. For example, at the start of the project, organizations commonly add process guidance on requirements gathering and prioritization, initial high-level design, and budget and schedule forecasting.
Roles[edit]
There are three core roles[9] and a range of ancillary roles. Core roles are often referred to as pigs and ancillary roles as chickens (after the story The Chicken and the Pig).
The core roles are those committed to the project in the Scrum process—they are the ones producing the product (objective of the project). They represent the scrum team.
- Product Owner
- The Product Owner represents the stakeholders and is the voice of the customer. He or she is accountable for ensuring that the team delivers value to the business. The Product Owner writes (or has the team write) customer-centric items (typically user stories), ranks and prioritizes them, and adds them to the product backlog. Scrum teams should have one Product Owner, and while they may also be a member of the development team, this role should not be combined with that of the Scrum Master. In an enterprise environment, though, the Product Owner is often combined with the role of Project Manager as they have the best visibility regarding the scope of work (products).
- Development Team
- The Development Team is responsible for delivering potentially shippable product increments at the end of each Sprint (the Sprint Goal). A Team is made up of 7 +/- 2 individuals with cross-functional skills who do the actual work (analyse, design, develop, test, technical communication, document, etc.). The Development Team in Scrum is self-organizing, even though there may be some level of interface with project management offices (PMOs).
- Scrum Master
- Scrum is facilitated by a Scrum Master, who is accountable for removing impediments to the ability of the team to deliver the sprint goal/deliverables. The Scrum Master is not the team leader, but acts as a buffer between the team and any distracting influences. The Scrum Master ensures that the Scrum process is used as intended. The Scrum Master is the enforcer of the rules of Scrum, often chairs key meetings, and challenges the team to improve. The role has also been referred to as a servant-leader to reinforce these dual perspectives. The Scrum Master differs from a Project Manager in that the latter may have people management responsibilities unrelated to the role of Scrum Master. The Scrum Master role excludes any such additional people responsibilities.
Although other roles may be encountered in real projects, Scrum does not define any other roles.[10]
Sprint[edit]
A sprint is the basic unit of development in Scrum. The sprint is a "timeboxed" effort; that is, it is restricted to a specific duration.[11] The duration is fixed in advance for each sprint and is normally between one week and one month, although two weeks is typical.[8]
Each sprint is preceded by a planning meeting, where the tasks for the sprint are identified and an estimated commitment for the sprint goal is made, and followed by a review or retrospective meeting,[5] where the progress is reviewed and lessons for the next sprint are identified.[citation needed]
Meetings[edit]
Daily Scrum[edit]
Each day during the sprint, a project team communication meeting occurs. This is called a daily scrum, or the daily standup. This meeting has specific guidelines:
- All members of the development team come prepared with the updates for the meeting.
- The meeting starts precisely on time even if some development team members are missing.
- The meeting should happen at the same location and same time every day.
- The meeting length is set (timeboxed) to 15 minutes.
- All are welcome, but normally only the core roles speak.
During the meeting, each team member answers three questions:[12]
- What have you done since yesterday?
- What are you planning to do today?
- Any impediments/stumbling blocks? Any impediment/stumbling block identified in this meeting is documented by the Scrum Master and worked towards resolution outside of this meeting. No detailed discussions shall happen in this meeting.
Backlog refinement (grooming)[edit]
This is the process of creating stories, decomposing stories into smaller ones when they are too large, refining the acceptance criteria for individual stories, prioritizing stories on the product backlog and sizing the existing stories in the product backlog using effort/points. During each sprint the team should spend time doing product backlog refinement to keep a pool of stories ready for the next sprint.
- Meetings should not be longer than an hour.
- Meeting does not include breaking stories into tasks.
- The team can decide how many meetings are needed per week.
- Though everything can be done in a single meeting, these are commonly broken into two types of meetings for efficiency:
- The refinement meeting, where the product owner and stakeholders create and refine stories on the product backlog.
- The planning poker meeting, where the team sizes the stories on the product backlog to make them ready for the next sprint.
Scrum of Scrums[edit]
Each day normally after the Daily Scrum:
- These meetings allow clusters of teams to discuss their work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration.
- A designated person from each team attends.
The agenda will be the same as the Daily Scrum, plus the following four questions:
- What has your team done since we last met?
- What will your team do before we meet again?
- Is anything slowing your team down or getting in their way?
- Are you about to put something in another team's way?
Sprint planning meeting[edit]
At the beginning of the sprint cycle (every 7–30 days), a "Sprint planning meeting" is held:[11][13]
- Select what work is to be done
- Prepare the Sprint Backlog that details the time it will take to do that work, with the entire team
- Identify and communicate how much of the work is likely to be done during the current sprint
- Eight-hour time limit
End of cycle[edit]
At the end of a sprint cycle, two meetings are held: the "Sprint Review Meeting" and the "Sprint Retrospective".
At the Sprint Review Meeting:[16]
- Review the work that was completed and the planned work that was not completed
- Present the completed work to the stakeholders (a.k.a. "the demo")
- Incomplete work cannot be demonstrated
- Four-hour time limit
At the Sprint Retrospective:[17]
- All team members reflect on the past sprint
- Make continuous process improvements
- Two main questions are asked in the sprint retrospective: What went well during the sprint? What could be improved in the next sprint?
- Three-hour time limit
- This meeting is facilitated by the Scrum Master
Artifacts[edit]
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Product Backlog[edit]
The product backlog is an ordered list of "requirements" that is maintained for a product. It consists of features, bug fixes, non-functional requirements, etc. - whatever needs to be done in order to successfully deliver a working software system. The items are ordered by the Product Owner based on considerations like risk, business value, dependencies, date needed, etc. The features added to the backlog are commonly written in story format (See terminology below). The product backlog is the "What" that will be built, sorted in the relative order in which it should be built. It is open and editable by anyone, but the Product Owner is ultimately responsible for ordering the stories on the backlog for the Development Team. The product backlog contains rough estimates of both business value and development effort, these values are often stated in story points using a rounded Fibonacci sequence. Those estimates help the Product Owner to gauge the timeline and may influence ordering of backlog items. For example, if the "add spellcheck" and "add table support" features have the same business value, the one with the smallest development effort will probably have higher priority, because the ROI (Return on Investment) is higher.
The Product Backlog and business value of each listed item is the responsibility of the Product Owner. The estimated effort to complete each backlog item is, however, determined by the Development Team. The team contributes by estimating Items and User-Stories, either in Story-points or in estimated hours.
Sprint Backlog[edit]
The sprint backlog is the list of work the Development Team must address during the next sprint. The list is derived by selecting stories/features from the top of the product backlog until the Development Team feels it has enough work to fill the sprint. This is done by the Development Team asking "Can we also do this?" and adding stories/features to the sprint backlog. The Development Team should keep in mind the velocity of its previous Sprints (total story points completed from each of the last sprint's stories) when selecting stories/features for the new sprint, and use this number as a guide line of how much "effort" they can complete.
The stories/features are broken down into tasks by the Development Team, which, as a best practice, should normally be between four and sixteen hours of work. With this level of detail the Development Team understands exactly what to do, and potentially, anyone can pick a task from the list. Tasks on the sprint backlog are never assigned; rather, tasks are signed up for by the team members as needed during the daily scrum, according to the set priority and the Development Team member skills. This promotes self-organization of the Development Team, and developer buy-in.
The sprint backlog is the property of the Development Team, and all included estimates are provided by the Development Team. Often an accompanying task board is used to see and change the state of the tasks of the current sprint, like "to do", "in progress" and "done".
Once a Sprint's Product Backlog is committed, no additional functionality can be added to the Sprint except by the team. Once a Sprint has been delivered, the Product Backlog is analyzed and reprioritized, if necessary, and the next set of functionality is selected for the next Sprint.
Increment[edit]
The increment is the sum of all the Product Backlog Items completed during a sprint and all previous sprints. At the end of a sprint, the Increment must be done according to the Scrum Team's definition of done. The increment must be in usable condition regardless of whether the Product Owner decides to actually release it.
Burn down[edit]
The sprint burn down chart is a publicly displayed chart showing remaining work in the sprint backlog. Updated every day, it gives a simple view of the sprint progress. It also provides quick visualizations for reference. There are also other types of burndown, for example the release burndown chart that shows the amount of work left to complete the target commitment for a Product Release (normally spanning through multiple iterations) and the alternative release burndown chart,[18] which basically does the same, but clearly shows scope changes to Release Content, by resetting the baseline.
It should not be confused with an earned value chart.
Terminology[edit]
The following terminology is used in Scrum:[19]
- Scrum Team
- Product Owner, Scrum Master and Development Team
- Product Owner
- The person responsible for maintaining the Product Backlog by representing the interests of the stakeholders, and ensuring the value of the work the Development Team does.
- Scrum Master
- The person responsible for the Scrum process, making sure it is used correctly and maximizing its benefits.
- Development Team
- A cross-functional group of people responsible for delivering potentially shippable increments of Product at the end of every Sprint.
- Sprint burn down chart
- Daily progress for a Sprint over the sprint's length.
- Release burn down chart
- Sprint level progress of completed stories in the Product Backlog.
- Product backlog
- A prioritized list of high-level requirements.
- Sprint backlog
- A prioritized list of tasks to be completed during the sprint.
- Sprint
- A time period (typically 1–4 weeks) in which development occurs on a set of backlog items that the team has committed to. Also commonly referred to as a Time-box or iteration.
- (User) Story
- A feature that is added to the backlog is commonly referred to as a story and has a specific suggested structure. The structure of a story is: "As a <user type> I want to <do some action> so that <desired result>" This is done so that the development team can identify the user, action and required result in a request and is a simple way of writing requests that anyone can understand. Example: As a wiki user I want a tools menu on the edit screen so that I can easily apply font formatting. A story is an independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, testable requirement ("INVEST"). Despite being independent, i.e., they have no direct dependencies with other requirements, stories may be clustered into epics when represented on a product roadmap or further down in the backlog.
- Theme
- A theme is a top-level objective that may span projects and products. Themes may be broken down into sub-themes, which are more likely to be product-specific. Themes can be used at both program and project level to drive strategic alignment and communicate a clear direction.
- Epic
- An epic is a group of related stories, mainly used in product roadmaps and the backlog for features that have not yet been analyzed enough to break down into component stories, which should be done before bringing it into a sprint so to reduce uncertainty. Epics can also be used at both program and project level.
- Spike
- A time boxed period used to research a concept and/or create a simple prototype. Spikes can either be planned to take place in between sprints or, for larger teams, a spike might be accepted as one of many sprint delivery objectives. Spikes are often introduced before the delivery of large epics or user stories in order to secure budget, expand knowledge, and/or produce a proof of concept. The duration and objective(s) of a spike will be agreed between the Product Owner and Delivery Team before the start. Unlike sprint commitments, spikes may or may not deliver tangible, shippable, valuable functionality. For example, the objective of a spike might be to successfully reach a decision on a course of action. The spike is over when the time is up, not necessarily when the objective has been delivered.
- Tracer Bullet
- The tracer bullet is a spike with the current architecture, current technology set, current set of best practices which results in production quality code. It might just be a very narrow implementation of the functionality but is not throw away code. It is of production quality and the rest of the iterations can build on this code. The name has military origins as ammunition that makes the path of the weapon visible, allowing for corrections. Often these implementations are a 'quick shot' through all layers of an application, such as connecting a single form's input field to the back-end, to prove the layers will connect as expected.
- Point Scale/Effort/Story points
- Relates to an abstract point system, used to discuss the difficulty of the story, without assigning actual hours. The most common scale used is a rounded Fibonacci sequence (1,2,3,5,8,13,20,40,100), although some teams use linear scale (1,2,3,4...), powers of two (1,2,4,8...), and clothes size (XS, S, M, L, XL).[20]
- Tasks
- Added to the story at the beginning of a sprint and broken down into hours. Each task should not exceed 12 hours, but it's common for teams to insist that a task take no more than a day to finish.
- Definition of Done (DoD)
- The exit-criteria to determine whether a product backlog item is complete. In many cases the DoD requires that all regression tests should be successful.
- Velocity
- The total effort a team is capable of in a sprint. The number is derived by evaluating the story points completed from the last few sprint's stories/features. This is a guideline for the team and assists them in understanding how many stories they can do in a future sprint.
- Impediment
- Anything that prevents a team member from performing work as efficiently as possible.[21]
- Sashimi
- A report that something is "done". The definition of "done" may vary from one Scrum team to another, but must be consistent within one team.
- Abnormal Termination
- The Product Owner can cancel a Sprint if necessary.[22] The Product Owner may do so with input from the team, Scrum Master or management. For instance, management may wish to cancel a sprint if external circumstances negate the value of the sprint goal. If a sprint is abnormally terminated, the next step is to conduct a new Sprint planning meeting, where the reason for the termination is reviewed.
- Planning Poker
- In the Sprint Planning Meeting, the team sits down to estimate its effort for the stories in the backlog. The Product Owner needs these estimates, so that he or she is empowered to effectively prioritize items in the backlog and, as a result, forecast releases based on the team's velocity.[20]
- ScrumBut
- A ScrumBut (or Scrum But) is an exception to the "pure" Scrum methodology, where a team has changed the methodology to adapt it to their own needs.[23][24]
Scrum-ban[edit]
Scrum-ban is a software production model based on Scrum and Kanban. Scrum-ban is especially suited for maintenance projects or (system) projects with frequent and unexpected user stories or programming errors. In such cases the time-limited sprints of the Scrum model are of no appreciable use, but Scrum's daily meetings and other practices can be applied, depending on the team and the situation at hand. Visualization of the work stages and limitations for simultaneous unfinished user stories and defects are familiar from the Kanban model. Using these methods, the team's workflow is directed in a way that allows for minimum completion time for each user story or programming error, and on the other hand ensures each team member is constantly employed.[25]
To illustrate each stage of work, teams working in the same space often use post-it notes or a large whiteboard.[26] In the case of decentralized teams, stage-illustration software such as Assembla, ScrumWorks, Rational Team Concert or JIRA in combination with Jira Agile[27] can be used to visualize each team's user stories, defects and tasks divided into separate phases.
In their simplest, the tasks or usage stories are categorized into the work stages:
- Unstarted
- Ongoing
- Completed
If desired, though, the teams can add more stages of work (such as "defined", "designed", "tested" or "delivered"). These additional phases can be of assistance if a certain part of the work becomes a bottleneck and the limiting values of the unfinished work cannot be raised. A more specific task division also makes it possible for employees to specialize in a certain phase of work.[28]
There are no set limiting values for unfinished work. Instead, each team has to define them individually by trial and error; a value too small results in workers standing idle for lack of work, whereas values too high tend to accumulate large amounts of unfinished work, which in turn hinders completion times.[29] A rule of thumb worth bearing in mind is that no team member should have more than two simultaneous selected tasks, and that on the other hand not all team members should have two tasks simultaneously.[28]
The major differences between Scrum and Kanban are derived from the fact that, in Scrum, work is divided into sprints that last a certain amount of time, whereas in Kanban the workflow is continuous. This is visible in work stage tables, which in Scrum are emptied after each sprint. In Kanban all tasks are marked on the same table. Scrum focuses on teams with multifaceted know-how, whereas Kanban makes specialized, functional teams possible.[30]
Since Scrum-ban is such a new development model, there is not much reference material. Kanban, on the other hand, has been applied by Microsoft and Corbis.[31]
Tools[edit]
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Tools that support Scrum include:
- Agilo for Trac - FOSS & Proprietary (Pro) Variants.
- Assembla - Proprietary.
- codeBeamer - Proprietary.
- IBM Rational Team Concert - Proprietary / free of charge for Open Source, Academic and Small Teams (<10).
- iceScrum - FOSS & Proprietary (Pro) Variants.
- JIRA using Jira Agile[Note 1] plugin[32] - Proprietary / possibly free of charge for Open Source, Academic?
- Kanbanery - Proprietary / free of charge for Open Source, Academic and Small Teams (<3).
- Kanban Tool - Proprietary.
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2010/2012, Team Foundation Server 2010/2012, Team Foundation Service - Proprietary.
- OnTime, by Axosoft - Proprietary.
- Pivotal Tracker - Some tools free of charge?
- Redmine and ChiliProject, with a plug-in (several are available) - FOSS.
- ScrumHalf, by GPE - Proprietary.
- Trello - Free of charge on-line.
- ServiceNow - Proprietary, via supported plugin
- YouTrack, by Jetbrains[Note 1] - Proprietary / free of charge for Open Source, Academic and Small Teams (<10).
See also[edit]
- Kaizen
- Extreme programming
- Test-driven development
- Feature-driven development
- Lean
- Scrum pattern
- Kanban board
Notes[edit]
- ^ Jump up to:a b Tools that also offer optional horizontal "swimlanes" or "pipelines" across the vertical columns of the board for different dimensions of work, such as sub-projects or features, allowing a scrum or Kanban board to be a two-dimensional matrix.