Working on a Scrum Team

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Working on a Scrum Team
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Making the case for Agile What weve been
doing isnt working
According to the 2006 report, 35 percent of
software projects started in 2006 completed on
time and on budget. "The primary reason is the
projects have gotten a lot smaller. Doing
projects with iterative processing as opposed to
the waterfall method, which called for all
project requirements to be defined up front, is a
major step forward." article

• On time
• On budget
• With all planned features

Success
Source Chaos Report from Standish Group (2001).
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And what is delivered isnt always used
Percent of Software Features Used
Source The Standish Group (2002).
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Best known Agile methodologies

• Scrum
• XP Extreme Programming
• DSDM Dynamic Systems Development Method
• Crystal
• FDD Feature Driven Development

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Collaborative, whole team

• Collaboration on activities
• Communication-centric
• Cross-functional
• Co-location

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Common shared vision and goals

• Vision flows into the team
• Clear focusing goals
• Emphasis on delivering intent
• Allow space for creative problem solving

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Iterative and incremental

• Time boxed development cycles
• Process activities parallel and concurrent
• Activities applied to smaller work units
• Frequent delivery of completed product
• New product increments built on existing working
  product
• Product kept continually up to standards

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Agile and adaptive control

• Incremental planning practices
• Heavy emphasis on feedback and visibility
• Frequent adaptation towards iteration goals
• Continuous reflection and improvement
• Self-organizing, peer teams
• Distributed, local, direct decision making

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Emphasis on being lean

• Traveling light
• Deliverables developed based on concrete need
• Elimination of hand-off artifacts
• Removal of waste in the process
• Preference towards simplicity
• Emergent development tactics

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We have come to value
Individuals and interactions
Processes and tools
over
Working software
Comprehensive documentation
over
Customer collaboration
Contract negotiation
over
Responding to change
Following a plan
over
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Scrum
The relay race approach to product
developmentmay conflict with the goals of
maximum speed and flexibility. Instead a holistic
or rugby approachwhere a team tries to go the
distance as a unit, passing the ball back and
forthmay better serve todays competitive
requirements.
Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, The New
New Product Development Game, Harvard Business
Review, January 1986.
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Scrum origins

• Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions by DeGrace
  and Stahl, 1990.
• First mention of Scrum in a software context
• Jeff Sutherland
• Initial Scrums at Easel Corp in 1993
• IDX and 600 people doing Scrum
• Not just for trivial projects
• FDA-approved, life-critical software for x-rays
  and MRIs
• Ken Schwaber
• ADM
• Initial definitions of Scrum at OOPSLA 96 with
  Jeff Sutherland

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Scrum has been used in
Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)
Offshore development
Small to medium-sized startups
Internal development
Fortune 100 companies
Contract development
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Characteristics

• One of the agile processes
• Self-organizing teams
• Product progresses in a series of month-long
  sprints
• Requirements are captured as items in a list of
  product backlog
• No specific engineering practices prescribed
• Uses generative rules to create an agile
  environment for delivering projects
• Proven scalability

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The waterfall process

1. What are the problems you see with the waterfall
   approach?
2. What are some ways organizations deal with them?
3. How would you solve them?

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Overview
24 hours
Daily Scrum Meeting
2-4 weeks
Backlog tasks expanded by team
Sprint Backlog
Potentially Shippable Product Increment
Product Backlog As prioritized by Product Owner
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Why do this?

• With Scrum, you can
• Remove risks early
• Cancel projects earlier that arent going to
  succeed
• Change priorities without penalty between sprints
• Realize benefits sooner by releasing earlier
• Increase the ROI of a project
• Increase productivity at least 2x in the first
  year much more thereafter
• Only deliver whats truly needed

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Scrum roles
ScrumMaster
Product Owner
The Team
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Six guiding principles
Source Agile Project Management by Jim Highsmith.
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Product delivery principles 12

• Ensure that a potentially shippable product is
  delivered each sprint
• Keep the focus on delivering features, not
  completing tasks

Employ iterative feature delivery

• Support the product owner by working on the
  highest-valued features first

Deliver customer value
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Product delivery principle 3

• Products need to deliver value today and tomorrow
• So we need to focus on adaptability and quality
• Dont become a champion of just the schedule

Champion technical excellence
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Championing technical excellence

• You want code youre so proud of that you hang it
  on your moms fridge

• Keep the emphasis on writing code well and the
  speed will come

When something is done well, its only a matter
of time until it is done quickly.
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Leadership/collaboration principles
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Additional responsibilities

• Responsible for enforcing the values and
  practices of the process and the team
• Remove impediments from the team
• Remove barriers between team and others
• Educate outside groups about how the team is
  working
• Improve the lives of team members
• Improve productivity in any way possible

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Keep an eye out for problems

• Most organizations release software every 612
  months
• When we compress this cycle to 2-4 weeks, it puts
  stress in new places
• The ScrumMaster watches for these stress points

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Scrum roles
ScrumMaster
Product Owner
The Team
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The product owner

• Represents (or is) the user or customer for the
  project
• One voice, even if not one person
• Typically a Product Manager, someone from
  Marketing, or similar
• Main responsibility is knowing what to build and
  in what sequence
• Conveys expectations by participating in test
  planning

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Product owner responsibilities

• Establish the vision
• Calls for releases
• Decides when to call for an official release of a
  potentially shippable product increment
• Can shift a release forward or backward to
  maximize ROI based on new knowledge
• Manage the return on investment (ROI)
• Establishes baseline target ROI
• Measures project against this baseline
• Prioritizes product backlog to maximize ROI

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Establishing a shared vision

• Teams do best when they have a clear, elevating
  goal and unified commitment
• Its the product owners job to focus the team
  and find this clear, elevating goal

Sources Teamwork by Carl Larson and Frank
LaFasto and Agile Project Management by Jim
Highsmith.
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A unified vision

• Does everyone on your current project share a
  unified vision?
• How can you establish a vision?

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Scrum roles
ScrumMaster
Product Owner
The Team
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The Scrum team

• Typically 5-10 people
• Cross-functional
• QA, Programmers, UI Designers, etc.
• Members should be full-time
• May be exceptions (e.g., Sys Admin, etc.)
• Teams are self-organizing
• Ideally no titles but rarely possible
• Membership can change only between sprints

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Teams are cross-functional

• This is not a cross-functional team

Sprint 2
Sprint 1
Sprint 3
Sprint 4
Sprint 5
Analysis
Coding
Testing
Analysis
Coding
Testing

• This is

Sprint 2
Sprint 1
Sprint 3
Sprint 4
Sprint 5
Analysis
Analysis
Analysis
Coding
Coding
Coding
Testing
Testing
Testing
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Team commitment

• The team picks the work theyll do in a sprint
• Which items
• How many
• The team commits to completing what they select
• Its a team commitment, not a set of individual
  commitments
• Has authority to do whatever is needed to meet
  this commitment

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Developing the right software

• Improves return on investment
• Solves problems with product owner involvement
• Reduces project politics