Scrum Project Management in Agile

Scrum Project Management in Agile .

In today's day and age when software is everywhere around us ,the quality of software used is therefore a crucial factor when it comes to remaining competitive .Agile software development methods are designed to reduce time to market (TTM) and improve software quality while increasing the relevance of products to customers needs .

Agile - The term “Agile” is used to describe lightweight software development process that are very different from traditional heavyweight methods. This term was coined at developer conference in Utah in 2001 where the Agile Manifest was first drafted.

Agile Methodology is a practice that promotes continuous iteration of development and testing throughout the software development life cycle of the project.

In the Agile model both the development and testing activities are concurrent unlike the waterfall model.

Scrum - Scrum is an Agile project management framework method . scrum does not determine which specific techniques software developers should use and instead leave such decisions to the development team itself .This usually leads to the use of Extreme programming techniques .Also scrum does not dictate the type of tests that an agile project is subjected to .

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Overview of Scrum Process

The Scrum Team is made up of three scrum roles

1.The Product Owner

2.The Team

3.The Scrum Master

The Product Owner

A product owner is who takes the input from executives, Team, Stakeholders, customers , users and translate into a product vision or product backlog

The Team

The team can consists of Developers , testers and even B.A’s .The team develops the products envisioned by the product owner

The Scrum Master

Does whatever it takes to make a scrum team successful such as removing organizational impediments , facilitating meetings so no one unnecessary interrupts the team's work .

Product Backlog

A product owner’s vision is compiled in a product backlog . A product backlog is a prioritized list of what's required and is ranked in the order of value to the customer or business with highest ranked items in the top of the list. The product backlog keeps evolving during the lifetime of the project and items are continuously added , removed or reprioritized .

The Sprint - Sprint is a product development cycle which is typically 1- 4 weeks long .The sprints are of fixed duration and end on a specific date whether the work has completed or not and they are never extended .

The Sprint Planning - At the beginning of the sprint a sprint planning meeting takes place . The product owner , the scrum team and the scrum master all are the part of the sprint planning .In this meeting the scrum teams take items from top of the list to complete by the end of the sprint starting from the top of the product backlog.

Each item selected from the product backlog is broken into individual tasks and the list of tasks is recorded in a document called the sprint backlog.

Daily Scrum Meeting - once the sprint has started , the scrum team engages into another key scrum practice known as the daily scrum meeting also known as the stand-up meeting .A daily standup is a small meeting done everyday at an appointed time and is short meeting of not more than 15 minutes , where the team discusses daily progress. This information may result in re-planning or further discussion as needed immediately after the daily scrum.

Sprint Review and Retrospective - After the Sprint ends, there is the Sprint Review, where the Scrum Team and stakeholder inspect what was done during the Sprint, discuss it, and figure out what to do next. The Product Owner, Team Members, Scrum Master, plus customers, stakeholders, experts, executives and anyone else interested are present in this meeting . Following the Sprint Review, the team gets together for the Sprint Retrospective which is an opportunity for the team to discuss what’s working and what’s not working, and agree on changes to try.