In today’s IT world, an agile approach to software development is increasingly required. This means that projects in which we used to assume in advance a budget, a schedule, or resources for product implementation are becoming less and less relevant, and technology companies are increasingly required to adopt an agile approach. Therefore, an approach that assumes changes during the development process has become a necessity in the production of products in the IT industry. These changes usually concern the scope of implementation, schedule or rotation in the scrum team. Scrum introduction is the first in a series of articles about agile software development methodology in IT.
Scrum in IT projects – Scrum introduction
Scrum is an iterative and incremental management methodology. Iterations are individual sprints lasting, depending on the project, from 2 to 6 weeks. (For small and medium-sized projects it is usually 2 weeks). However, with individual increments we define a release, i.e. the release of certain elements in the project. The publication consists of a part of the project. For example, the home page or the header of a website.
Scrum relies heavily on the team’s self-generated relationships and assumes that the team will self-organize in order to implement the project more effectively.
Roles of scrum team members:
Scrum master — a person who takes care of the implementation of scrum as a process. Caring for the punctuality of individual parts (planning, stand-ups, retrospective).
Product Owner — a person who decides what is to be done by the team in a given sprint. At the beginning of the sprint, it communicates the product information, and at the end of the sprint, it collects the work done.
The team — team members, developers, devops, testers. Team members decide how much they are able to accomplish in a given sprint and with what methodology. Product Owner, Scrum Master or other people not directly involved in the production of the product do not decide on the choice of methodologies or parts to be made. The scrum team always decides about it.
User Story
Before starting the project, a User Story is created. It is a collection of all product functionalities. A user story includes, for example, describing a feature’s operation, implementing a fully functional website, etc.
The user story is most often created by the product owner and defined until the team decides that they have a complete picture of the task, which is consistent. At the end, the user story is estimated by the team.
An important step is the team’s estimation of the entire User Story. The estimation does not have to be precise, but the key is that it should be done by the team, not the ordering party or the product owner. This allows you to pre-plan resources and divide the responsibility for estimation among the entire team. However, a more accurate estimation is always made at the beginning of the sprint.
Story Point
The unit of measure for the difficulty of a task is the story point. It is an abstract unit that does not define the number of hours required to complete a task, but rather the degree of difficulty / complexity that must be invested in order to complete the task.
Story point values are most often the Fibonacci sequence:
0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 …
Epic
Epic is a collection of User Stories that combine to provide a single, common functionality. This means that multiple User Stories make up a single entity called Epic. In other words, Epic is a large body of work that can be broken down into several smaller tasks called Stories. An Epic in the Scrum Methodology can be defined as a large body of work with one common goal.
This can be a feature, a customer request or a business requirement. It speaks succinctly about the final outcome of user needs. Based on it, it is easier to plan a long-term strategy, i.e. a release. Epic should not contain all the details the team needs to work on, these details are defined in User Stories. Epic usually requires more than one sprint and may consist of even a dozen User Stories.
The basic unit of work defined in Scrum is the user story. However, very often the same user story expands so much that it doesn’t fit in a week or in a Sprint. If this is the case, it’s a good idea to think of the user story as an Epic, and start breaking it down into smaller user stories. In this way, Agile teams get smaller but concrete results in a single sprint.
Scrum Introduction Product backlog and release
Product backlog – a concept related to the scrum method. It is a prioritised list of all tasks that should be performed to receive the product. Literally translated, this is a product register. This register starts the entire scrum cycle. This is the only source of requirements for any changes that need to be made to the product. It is the basis of the customer’s requirements for the final shape of the expected product.
The main person responsible for the product backlog is the Product owner. This scope includes the content of the backlog, its availability and ordering. It mainly consists of features, requirements, proposed improvements that should be made in future product releases.
In addition, the backlog includes so-called description, order, respect, and value attributes. Backlog items often contain test descriptions that confirm that it is complete after the task is completed. The product backlog grows larger and larger as the product is used and begins to gain value, and product users provide feedback.
Release — the release of a product or its elements that have been planned in a given sprint.
Backlog — the place where all tasks are collected before the sprint starts. In planning, the scrum team selects tasks from the backlog and makes estimates.
Summary
In the above post, we discussed the naming of the key scrum elements as a scrum introduction. In the next article, we will focus on the course of the sprint and the use of the introduced nomenclature for project management. You can learn more about Scrum on the Wikipedia website and the Atlassian project management software provider.
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