An Overview of the Scrum Framework

This video breaks down the basics of one of the most popular Agile frameworks, Scrum, and covers topics like:  

  • Scrum Roles
  • Scrum teams
  • Backlog Prioritization
  • Scrum ceremonies
  • Sprint cycles

See below for the full transcription.

Video Transcription

Hi, I’m David Hawks with Agile Velocity. Today, I’d like to give you an overview of the Scrum Framework.

Scrum Roles

In Scrum, there are three basic roles: the Product Owner, the ScrumMaster, and Development Team.

The Product Owner is responsible for the vision of a product and for turning said vision into an ordered list of items for the Development Team—or Dev Team— to work on. Their job is to create clarity for the team and to act as a conduit between the Dev Team and the customer. The ScrumMaster’s job is to facilitate the Scrum process and to help the team improve. The Dev Team is made up of all the people required to get the product built and to the customer.  

Prioritizing Our Work

In Scrum, we start off with something called the Product Backlog, which the Product Owner is responsible for maintaining. Anyone can contribute and feed items into the backlog, but the Product Owner manages and orders this list. We say order, as opposed to prioritize, because we don’t want the items in the backlog to all be marked as high priority by senior management. We want them in a specific order from most important to least important.

Scrum Events and Cycles

Now, the first event in Scrum is called Sprint Planning. In Sprint Planning, the Dev Team is meeting with the Product Owner and pulling in items from the Product Backlog and into the Sprint Backlog—the list of items the team plans to work on during that specific Sprint. Notice I use the term “pull”, meaning the team selects the work they will do in a Sprint based on the order of items in the Product Backlog. The team then breaks down these items into tasks, typically no bigger than a day’s worth of work. The goal of Sprint Planning is to answer the questions “What are we going to work on, and how are we going to do it?” It’s also important for the team to have a shared goal and a shared commitment to this goal before beginning their Sprint.

Once we begin a Sprint, we have what we call a Daily Scrum every day. The Daily Scrum is where the Dev Team syncs up on the plan that they created during Sprint Planning. This is also when the team pulls in tasks for the day, discusses any blockers they might have, and creates visibility around the work that everyone is doing in the Sprint.

At the end of the Sprint, the goal is to have a Potentially Shippable Product Increment (PSPI). We’re trying to get something of incremental value done every Sprint. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re shipping every two weeks, but the product or part of the product created is valuable enough that it could ship if need be.

The next step is to get feedback on the thing that we built during our Sprint. We make sure that we’re headed on the right path and see if there’s anything we need to adapt to better fit the user’s needs.This feedback will then become items that will be looped back into the Product Backlog, where it can be ordered and pulled in by the team in a future Sprint.

The last Scrum Event is the Sprint Retrospective. This is where the Scrum Team (Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and Dev Team) meets to reflect on their previous Sprint and to figure out how to improve as a team. Retrospectives typically last 90 minutes and are there to help us incorporate continuous improvement into our team culture and into our Sprint cadence.

So, that’s the complete Sprint process! The next day, it’s time to kick off the next Sprint with Sprint Planning and repeat the cycle.

 

So that, in it’s simplest form, is the Scrum Framework. Thank you.