What is Scrum?

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 What is it? 

Scrum is a framework designed to foster an Agile environment. Scrum prioritizes the ideals of Transparency, Inspection, and Adaption. These ideas are well aligned to the teaching of Agile, and many companies leverage the Scrum framework for their Agile transformation.  

How does it work? 

Scrum teams create value (generally software) in pre-determined periods of time called a Sprint. The team's activities are centered around the concept of delivering maximum value to the customer each sprint, reflecting on learnings from the last sprint (inspection), and applying those learnings to the next sprint (adaption). Most popularly, a sprint is two weeks long, but teams have successfully leveraged one week and one month-long sprints.  

What is a Scrum Team?  

A scrum team consists of 3 key roles: Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Developer. Generally, a scrum team consists of 5 to 9 people (a lot of research has been done about the benefits and risks to various team sizes, links included in the resources section). Generally, a Scrum Master's role is to aid the team in navigating the Scrum framework, encourage transparency, enable inspection, and advocate for adaption. A Product Owner is generally the voice of the customer, prioritizing the team's work to maximize customer to value, soliciting feedback from the customer, and is responsible for helping the team understand what the customers require. The Developer is responsible for authoring the code required to deliver valuable software and ensuring solutions delivered are technically excellent.  

What does a Scrum team do? 

A scrum team uses four ceremonies to help prepare, execute and evaluate their work. These ceremonies are Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective. With the exception of Daily Scrum, these ceremonies are generally aligned to the sprint cycle and happen once per sprint.  

What is Daily Scrum? 

Often referred to as Stand Up, The Daily Scrum Ceremony provides a brief opportunity for the team to coordinate the day's activities. Generally, about 15 minutes (so short you don't even need to sit down, hence 'Stand Up'), each team member shares three key pieces of information. · What they accomplished yesterday· What do they plan to do today· Explain any impediments in their way Some teams will block additional time following the Daily Scrum in case additional conversations are needed to remove impediments for the day. This is sometimes referred to as the '16th minute' but sometimes as an 'after-party.'  

What is Sprint Planning? 

Sprint Planning is when the team gets together to determine which items from the backlog they should commit to delivering in the upcoming sprint. Although the Product Owner will have the backlog clearly prioritized, it is the full team that will determine what they can commit to for each sprint. Teams will typically create a ballpark estimate for each item so they can get a general understanding of how much work they are committing to each sprint. However, scrum accepts that much will remain unknown about each item until it is worked on, so these estimates should only be used directionally by team members and never by folks outside the team.

What is Sprint Review?

Sprint reviews are a key opportunity for the scrum team to provide transparency about the value the team has created in the previous sprint. The sprint review is not an opportunity to report on points completed or individual development tasks but to show stakeholders the value the team has delivered and solicit feedback from stakeholders. 

 What is Sprint Retrospective?

A Sprint Retrospective is an opportunity for the team to inspect their past process and adapt their process based on their learnings at the end of each sprint. An ideal retrospective creates an environment where each team member feels comfortable to honestly share their feedback. A retrospective should create transparency within the team but is not meant to create transparency outside the team. Vegas rules should generally apply to a retrospective; what happens in the retrospective should stay in the retrospective. The best retrospectives result in immediate adaption so that the team can inspect the results of the adaption in the next retrospective. The best Scrum Masters prioritize enabling successful retrospectives.