Sprint & Scrum

The Scrum process begins by reviewing a product backlog with the product owner. You identify the highest-priority features and then estimate how many will fit into a sprint. These features then compose the sprint backlog. A sprint is a predefined period of time, usually 2 to 4 weeks, during which the team analyzes, designs, constructs, tests, and documents the selected features.

The team holds a daily status meeting, referred to as the daily Scrum, to review feature status. This meeting has specific guidelines as below:

• The meeting starts sharp on time.

• All are welcome, but only “developers” may speak

• The meeting is “time boxed” to 15 minutes

• The meeting should happen at the same location and same time every day During the meeting, each team member answers three questions:
1. What have you accomplished since our last meeting?
2. What are you planning to do today?
3. Do you have any problems preventing you from accomplishing your goal?
(It is the role of the Scrum Master to facilitate resolution of these impediments. Typically this should occur outside the context of the Daily Scrum so that it may stay under 15 minutes.)

When a sprint is completed, the features are demonstrated to the customer, and the team and the customer decide whether additional work is needed or if the sprint work is approved to be released to a beta or production environment. Each sprint is followed by a retrospective during which the team lists items that went well or poorly;

action plans are documented to keep the successes going and to improve the areas that performed poorly.

Scrum strengths:
Prioritized delivery —Features are delivered in a sequence that ties to business value.
Status transparency —The daily meetings expose the project status.
Team accountability —Everyone signs off on the work that will be pursued during the sprint.
Continuous delivery —Scrum delivers product features (commercial software or web portals) continuously.

Scrum weaknesses:
Scrum doesn’t want specialists. It may be difficult to quickly convert an existing team from a group of specialists to a group where anyone can perform any task.
A Scrum team can’t be successful without a strong ScrumMaster, which makes the process highly dependent on one individual.

Scrum is incredibly popular today—it’s almost become synonymous with the term agile development. Scrum provides a great, repeatable process that is well suited for product development and steady-state release management.