Scrum Agile Development Methodology

Scrum is an agile development approach to manage software development. Inspirited by the shortcomings and gradual fall of various prevailing project management paradigms like waterfall concept, the Scrum approach focuses on collaboration, team management, functioning software, and flexibility.

It provides an iterative and an accumulative approach to software development. Here, a large project is divided into Sprints, where each sprint completes a set of tasks, which eventually helps in moving closer towards project completion. Depending upon the project, each sprint can take few weeks or even a month. As the product is developed in phases one at a time, it provides ample amount of time to work on the feedback and achieve more preciseness. Once a sprint is complete, team members and stakeholders plan and decide on its next steps. This keeps on repeating at the end of each sprint.

In a nutshell the sprint is used to design, code, and test the product.

The essence of scrum lies in its flexibility. It allows a customer to ask for modification or changes while a project is being developed. Scrum follows an empirical approach to tackle any uncertain challenges coming out due to requirement churn, which otherwise remain unaddressed by conventional approaches. By emphasizing on maximizing the team’s ability, scrum can help in providing quick delivery.  Moreover, it helps us cope with the required unpredictability of unending discovery and learning.

How does agile embrace scrum?

Out of the many agile approaches, scrum fits with agile in more than one way. However, it totally depends upon the situation, as many seek more specific methods like extreme programming, dynamic systems development method, and feature driven development. In most cases, scrum can help you in providing early breakthroughs. You can also get to know and practice test-driven development. By using scrum, you can be more agile and work directly towards delivering business value.

Scrum Framework

The scrum framework involves three components: Roles, Events, and Artifacts.

Roles: There are three roles in scrum: Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Team.

Product Owner: The product owner is responsible for defining and prioritizing features and release plans. In addition, he/she must be available to respond to queries from the team and accept or reject the work results.

Scrum Master: The scrum master ensures the execution of scrum practices and values. By ensuring cooperation across all roles and functions, it helps the team to be fully functional and productive.

Team: The team is a self-managing role. A team comprises of testers, programmers, graphic designers, etc.

Events: There are three events in scrum: Daily scrum meeting, Sprint reviews, and Sprint retrospective.

Daily scrum meeting: The daily scrum meeting includes the participation of all the sprint team members. The meeting is just to update about the status and can last up to 10-15 minutes.

Sprint reviews: It involves all the major stakeholders. The event highlights the completed work during the sprint and provides demo of any new feature.

Sprint retrospective:  It’s a periodic event done after every sprint to check what’s working and what’s not.

Artifacts: There are three artifacts in scrum: Product backlog, Sprint backlog, Sprint burndown charts.

Product backlog: It has a list of all desired work prioritized by the product owner. However, after each sprint, it is again prioritized.
Sprint backlog: The scrum team selects tasks that need to be completed during the sprint.
Sprint burndown charts: It reflects the work left within the sprint and is updated daily.

Also read: A glance at Agile Scrum Methodology