Agile Development and Planning

The following content was based on the guidance of my previous instructor John Rofrano.

Agile and Scrum

• Agile is a PHILOSOPHY for doing work - agile software development is an approach to software development under which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customer(s)

• NEITHER prescriptive NOR a new version of a waterfall SDLC, where you do legacy development in sprints

• Scrum is a METHODOLOGY for doing work that adds PROCESS to Agile thinking, is an agile framework for managing knowledge work, with an emphasis on software development

What is Scrum?

Scrum is the most popular Agile development framework created by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber in 1990's

• A management framework based on lean thinking for incremental product development using small cross-functional, self-organizing teams

• Provides a structure of roles, meetings, rules, and artifacts

• Uses fixed-length iterations, called Sprints, which are typically two weeks long

• Scrum teams attempt to build a potentially shippable (properly tested) product increment every iteration

• Roles

Product Owner + Development Team + Scrum Master

• Artifacts

Product Backlog + Sprint Backlog + Done Increment

• Events

Sprint Planning + Daily Scrum + Sprint Review + Sprint Retrospective + Sprint

Mechanics of Scrum

Scrum is a structure to help achieve goals and create value, it requires a Scrum Master to foster an environment where:

A Product Owner orders the work for a complex problem into a Product Backlog

The Scrum Team turns a selection of the work into an Increment of value during a Sprint

The Scrum Team and its stakeholders inspect the results and adjust for the next Sprint

Repeat

Scrum events implement the empirical Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation

Scrum Theory

• Transparency: Work must be visible to those performing the work as well as those receiving the work, Transparency enables inspection. Inspection without transparency is misleading and wasteful

• Inspection: The Scrum artifacts and the progress toward agreed goals must be inspected frequently and diligently to detect potentially undesirable variances or problems, Inspection enables adaptation; inspection without adaptation is considered pointless

• Adaptation: If any aspects of a process deviate outside acceptable limits or if the resulting product is unacceptable, the process being applied or the materials being produced must be adjusted; Adaptation becomes more difficult when the people involved are not empowered or self-managing

Benefits of Scrum

Organizations that have adopted agile Scrum have experienced:

• Higher productivity

• Better-quality products

• Reduced time to market

• Better team dynamics

Scrum is designed for open-ended evolutionary product development

Scrum is not for doing projects to deliver a thing by a date for price

- Scrum denies that such a challenge has a meaningful answer available

- Project management literature offers a vast tool box for managing such conversations