- Scrum development is based on an idea from rugby, specifically that a team's functioning as a team and not as a group of individuals as key to success.
- And the best teams are given direction but can devise their own tactics for how to achieve their goals. Scrum came about in the early 90s, where as Agile was formalized in the early 2000s. But Scrum's architects were part of the group that created the Agile alliance.
- Using Scrum means that the team comes together to prioritize what to do next and set short goals for what work to finish. You as the product manager will have very strong input into that part of the process.
- Then the team goes off and figures out how to do best that work. You will check in with the team members at the start of each day as they work, addressing any questions and you'll validate the work when they say it's ready. But you don't micro-manage them or change their goals, before they're done with the current set.
- Scrum is one of the most common approach you have to Agile because it is a very, clearly defined project structure with clear team roles. This makes it easy for our company transitioning from Waterfall to Agile to adopt Scrum.
- And even if companies don't fully implement Scrum, they often borrow ideas from it, such as a daily standup check in meeting. Scrum uses time boxed sprints.
+ Most commonly one or two weeks and each week, you meet with the engineering team to perform backlog grooming.
+ A products backlog is the collection of all the bugs and suggestions, generally written as user stories for the product.
- Grooming simply means, you make sure the bugs are organized and have enough clarity to act on. Also during the grooming meeting, the engineering team will assess the complexity of newer updated stories, breaking them down into sub-task if necessary.
+ After assessing the complexity, your role as the product owner, will be to provide rough prioritization for any new items, along with the existing backlog items, based on customer need, business value and long-term goals.
+ Your goal, with this prioritization, is to have the most important thing to work on next at the top of the backlog. During the sprint, you'll have short 15 minute meetings called stand ups at the start of each work day, where each team member states what they did during the past day, what they aim to accomplish today and if anything is blocking those accomplishments.
- At the end of the sprint, you'll have a demo meeting with key stakeholders. This may include customers as well. To show what you've built, engage their feedback.
- And then internal sprint, retrospective, to assess how the sprint went. When done well, while combining Scrum and lean methodologies, Scrum tends to provide a very nice balance of planning ahead and tolerating change, which is generally very valuable.
- There are some challenges with Scrum. Some of these province have lead to the cries that Agile did. The heart of that argument is that the Agile movement was supposed to be about individuals and interactions and responding to change.
- Scrum has become synonymous with Agile, yet implementing Scrum is often more about process over individuals and change has been limited to enable better planning. In other words, Agile has been, perhaps argued to be as rigid as Waterfall.
- Standup meetings are example of that rigidity. The goal is to keep the team apprised of what's going on and help unblock any issues at the start of the day. But if your team starts it's day at different times, or works in different time zones, then the standup meetings aren't as effective because they'll start one day, one time for one person and a different day, time for another person.
- Scrum can also create headaches for you. It's often up to the product manager to do acceptance testing, making sure each user story is completed correctly and without bugs. And this can be very demanding of your time. There's also a challenge of quality assurance and what role the product manager might play there in a Scrum model, that might be different than elsewhere.
- A final downside is that of waiting for the whole sprint to complete in order to see results. Given how easy it is to release software in today's world, such as with Web-Ax, there is an alternative Agile approach that we'll explore next called Kanban.
