Approaching Scrum

Have you ever felt disappointed because you don’t finish a project in time?
When you try to estimate a project you feel like a poker player?
Have you ever wrote bad code because you were overtime and you needed to delivery as fast as possible?

If you think that there isn’t a way to escape from this nightmare you are completely wrong and I understood it in the las few months as well!
I don’t want to say that with Agile you can solve everything, but what I can say that for sure it can help you to achieve your goals and deliver in time with the best quality and value for your customers or users.

Let’s start from the beginning…

What is Scrum?

Scrum is an iterative and incremental Agile software development framework for managing software projects and product or application development. Its focus is on “a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal” as opposed to a “traditional, sequential approach”. Scrum enables the creation of self-organizing teams by encouraging co-location of all team members, and verbal communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.

From Wikipedia.org

When you start to read about Scrum a lot of things seem impossible to apply in your daily job but I think that, like any transition period, you can arrive to work completely in Scrum in less than 6 months if you really want change your organization and improve it.
From my experience Scrum is a good framework that should be used extensively if you are working in products that will be delivered to the final user, otherwise you have to train up your customer to be Agile; but in the real world it could be more difficult.
Mainly because you need to have a good trustability before start to involve them in an Agile process and sometimes there isn’t enough time to do so.

Why have I to use Scrum?

That’s a good question, it was the same that I asked me few months ago and finally I’ve an answer, if you are a developer think when you started to write the first lines of code, obviously day by day you increase your knowledge and your code became even better until to the procedural code it wasn’t enough and you try to look to something more.
Then you have discovered OOP concepts and maybe design patterns, after few times you started to work with MVC, MVP, MVVM or your favourite architecture and probably after many years if you look back you won’t write procedural code anymore.
Does it sound familiar?
In the same way of Design Patterns and a micro-architecture that drive you to create solid and maintainable project, Scrum can help you to organise your projects creating a great business value, knowing every time the next steps and the actual status of the project, estimating better the goals and the time to achieve them and last but not least to drive the risk in a better way than the “traditional” methodology (waterfall model for instance).

How does Scrum works?

As you can see from the diagram above, Scrum is an iterative workflow that happens in a small amount of time (usually 2 weeks or 4 weeks at least) where with few documents and a lot of communication you can achieve the best trade off between the business value for your final customer and the best quality of your software.
Scrum is composed by some actors (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development team and Stakeholders), some meetings (Release Planning, Backlog Refinement, Daily Scrum, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective) and few artifacts (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Burndown chart, Product Increment).
The most important concept that you have to keep in mind is that Scrum is easy to use and to understand but if you want to have its benefits you have to follow its rules.
To enter in this interesting world you have to keep in mind the 3 main concepts of an empirical process like Scrum:

• Transparency
• Inspection
• Adaptation

Without this 3 fundamentals principles, Scrum it’s not useful at all!
Transparency means that you and your team don’t have to hide anything to anybody, if there are any impediments or problems or bottleneck following Scrum you can find and resolve them.
Inspection means that you and your team have to analyse what you have done after a small amount of time (Sprint Retrospective) and find what positive or negative was happened during that period.
Adaptation means that everything is not binary (0 or 1, true or false) but you have to adapt your way to work day by day improving yourself inspecting what you have done and being agile!

If you want Scrum is not only a good approach to work, it could be a good approach for life as well!
(Check also this useful article on Scrum Alliance website that explains Scrum in 30 secs)

Ok, now I’m really interested in Scrum, where to begin?

There are many books that allow you to enter in this amazing world, the first one that I can suggest you is Essential Scrum: a practical guide to the most popular Agile process

In this book you can really understand how the Scrum framework works and how to use it in your daily job.
I also suggest it if you are planning to join in a Scrum training course, it can really help you to have a good preparation for the course and for the following certification exam.

Next steps

What I’d like to share with you is my notes about Scrum studied on books, read on blog or social networks and share with my fellows, my idea is to fix few concepts on this blog that could be helpful also for people that is approaching Scrum right now or they would like to know more about it.
There are really tons of things to know and you’ll never finish to learn (as usual) so I think a blog it could be a good resource to share the basic of Scrum and in the future, going more in deep with real case studies related to my daily job.
I hope you will enjoy this information that are not what you usually find in my blog but maybe could be interesting as well, as usual any suggestion will be very appreciated so don’t be shy and share your thoughts!