Scrum For Dummies

Mark C. Layton, David Morrow

• Editore: For Dummies
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119467694
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Project Management

Use scrum in all aspects of life

Scrum is an agile project management framework that allows for flexibility and collaboration to be a part of your workflow. Primarily used by software developers, scrum can be used across many job functions and industries. Scrum can also be used in your personal life to help you plan for retirement, a trip, or even a wedding or other big event.

Scrum provides a small set of rules that create just enough structure for teams to be able to focus their innovation on solving what might otherwise be an insurmountable challenge. Scrum For Dummies shows you how to assemble a scrum taskforce and use it to implement this popular Agile methodology to make projects in your professional and personal life run more smoothly—from start to finish.

• Discover what scrum offers project and product teams
• Integrate scrum into your agile project management strategy
• Plan your retirement or a family reunion using scrum
• Prioritize for releases with sprints

No matter your career path or job title, the principles of scrum are designed to make your life easier. Why not give it a try?

Part 1

Getting Started with Scrum

IN THIS PART…

Connect scrum with the principles of agile project management.

Use constant feedback through transparency and quantification to elevate success rates of projects.

Become tactically flexible to create strategic stability.

Chapter 1

The Basics of Scrum

IN THIS CHAPTER

Seeing essential scrum principles

Identifying useful scrum values and structure

Scrum is an empirical exposure model, which means that people who employ the scrum model have gained knowledge from real-life experience and make decisions based on that experience. It’s a way of organizing your project — whether it be releasing a new smartphone or coordinating your daughter’s fifth-grade birthday party — to expose whether your approach is generating intended results. If you need to get something done, scrum provides a structure for increased efficiency and faster results.

Within scrum, common sense reigns. You focus on what can be done today, with an eye toward breaking future work into manageable pieces. You can immediately see how well your development methodology is working, and when you find inefficiencies in your approach, scrum enables you to act on them by making adjustments with clarity and speed.

Although empirical exposure modeling goes back to the beginning of time in the arts — in sculpting, for example, you chisel away, check the results, make any adaptations necessary, and chisel away some more — its modern-day usage stems from computer modeling. The empirical exposure model means observing or experiencing actual results rather than simulating them based on research or a mathematical formula and then making decisions based on these experiences. In scrum, you break your project into actionable chunks and then observe your results every step of the way. This approach allows you to immediately make the changes necessary to keep your project on the best track possible.

The Bird’s-Eye Basics

Scrum isn’t a methodology; it’s a new way of thinking. It isn’t a paint-by-numbers approach in which you end up with a product; it’s a simple framework for clearly defining roles and organizing your actionable work so that you’re more effective in prioritizing work and more efficient in completing the work selected. Frameworks are less prescriptive than methodologies and provide appropriate amounts of flexibility for processes, structures, and tools that complement them. When this approach is used, you can clearly observe and adopt complementary methods and practices, and quickly determine whether you’re making real, tangible progress. You create tested, usable results within weeks, days, or (in some cases) hours.

Like the process of building a house brick by brick, scrum is an iterative, incremental approach. It gives you early empirical evidence of performance and quality. Roles are distinct and self-ruling, with individuals and teams being given the freedom and tools required to get the job done. Lengthy progress reports, redundant meetings, and bloated management layers are nonexistent. If you just plain want to get the job done, scrum is the approach to use.

Scrum is a term that comes from the rough-and-tumble game of rugby. Huddles, or scrums, are formed with the forwards from one side interlocking their arms, heads down, and pushing against the forwards from the opposing team who are also interlocking arms with their heads down. The ball is then thrown into the midst of this tightly condensed group of athletes. Although each team member plays a unique position, all team members play both attacking and defending roles, and work together to move the ball down the field of play. Like rugby, scrum relies on talented people with varying responsibilities and domains working closely together in teams toward a common goal.

We want to emphasize, and have written two thirds of this book on, an overlooked concept of scrum: its amazing versatility. People who know about scrum commonly think that it’s customized for software, information technology (IT), or tech use, but that’s just the tip of the scrumberg. Absolutely any project — large, small, tech, artistic, social, personal — can be productively placed within the scrum framework. In Chapters 8 through 18, we show you how. Be forewarned! Scrum is such an addictive framework that you’ll be using it to coach your kid’s soccer team, plan your Neighborhood Watch, and even ratchet up your exercise routine.

Roadmap to value

Throughout this book, we discuss techniques some expert scrum practitioners apply as common practice extensions to scrum. These techniques complement, not replace, the scrum framework. We point out the differences when they occur. All the common practices that we include and recommend are tried and tested — always with the clear understanding that these practices are outside of the basic scrum framework and are suggested for your consideration in your own situation.

We call this aggregation of scrum and vetted common practices the “roadmap to value.” This roadmap consists of seven stages that walk you through the vision stage of your project to the task level and back again in a continual process of inspection and adaptation. In other words, the stages help you see what you want to achieve and progressively break that vision into pieces through an efficient cycle that leads to real results every day, week, and month.

You know that billion-dollar idea that’s been lurking in the back of your head for years? Follow the seven stages. They show you the feasibility and fallacy of your idea and where to make your improvements — step by step, piece by piece.

Figure 1-1 shows a holistic view of the roadmap to value. This figure shows that you begin with the vision; work through planning; and then enter the cyclical world of sprints, reviews, and retrospectives.

FIGURE 1-1: The seven stages in the roadmap to value.

Scrum overview

The process of scrum is simple and circular, with constant and transparent elements of inspection and adaptation. First, a ruthlessly ordered to-do list — called a product backlog — is created and maintained. Then top-priority items are selected for a fixed, regular time period — called a sprint — within which the scrum team strives for a predetermined and mutually agreed upon goal.

Figure 1-2 shows an overview of scrum.

FIGURE 1-2: A simplified overview of the events and cycles of scrum.

The scrum process allows you to adapt quickly to changing market forces, technological constraints, regulations, new innovations, and almost anything else you can think of. The key is the ongoing process of working on the highest-priority items to completion. Each of the highest-priority items gets fully developed and tested through the following steps:

1. Requirement elaboration
2. Design
3. Development
4. Comprehensive testing
5. Integration
6. Documentation
7. Approval

The seven steps to fully build the scope of each requirement are performed for every item. Every requirement taken on during a sprint, no matter how small or large, is fully built, tested, and approved or rejected.

When a requirement is accepted and therefore deemed shippable, you know that it works. Hope and guesswork are taken out of the equation and replaced by reality. You build your product increment by increment and showcase these tangible increments to stakeholders for feedback. This feedback generates new requirements that are placed in the product backlog and prioritized against existing known work.

What’s more important: efficiency or effectiveness? Hands...