Applied project management #3 Quick overview of scrum

• Scrum is one of the most popular frameworks under the agile umbrella. 
• Simple to understand, and difficult to practice as it is value driven, than rule based. 
• Highly transparent, based on empiricism.
• Revolves around Plan, Do, Study and Act (PDSA) cycle by Deming.
• Highly committed, capable teams is a must to have successful scrum implementations, as the work revolves around self organizing teams. 

•  They key roles in Scrum

• Product owner (who maintains the product backlog, an prioritizes the features for development) 
• Scrum master, who is accountable for implementing scrum and removing impediments faced by the team during development. 
• Development team converts the agreed requirements into product increments

• The key ceremonies of scum
•  Sprint planning meeting 
• An eight hour planning meeting for 30 days sprint (iteration), which is the maximum allowed duration of the sprint. For shorter sprint duration, the sprint planning meeting time can be shorter. However, it will take a minimum of approximately five hours to conduct a proper sprint planning, irrespective of the duration of the sprint. 
• During the sprint planning meeting, the product owner proposes a prioritized set of features to the development team. The product owner clarifies all the queries of the team. The team estimates the amount of work involved, and then commits. 
• The output of the sprint planning meeting are the sprint review date, time and  the sprint backlog, which comprises of the agreed upon set of features, the tasks required to build those features, their estimates and the acceptance criteria.
• Sprinting
• The team starts converting the items in the sprint backlog to the increments of the product. There is no work allocation. The team members volunteers (self organize). 
• Scrum (Daily standup meeting)
• Every day, the team conducts a stand up meeting, where each member communicates three things to the rest of the team in two minutes time;
• What did I do yesterday?
• What am I doing today?
• What are the issues I am facing and need help to resolve them? 
• Sprint review meeting 
• Upon the agreed upon date and time (sprint planning meeting), the increment of the product built during the sprint is demonstrated to the stakeholders. If all the agreed upon acceptance criteria (sprint planning meeting) are met, the sprint is considered as successful.  
• Sprint retrospective meeting 
• The sprint retrospective is conducted to analyze  the lessons learned during the sprint, both positive and negative, with a view to improve the subsequent sprints.

Download the official scrum guide