Scrum – A Brief Introduction

Scrum – A Brief Introduction & Cursory Familiarization

Scrum – A brief introduction is presented simply to provide Engineers with a cursory familiarization of the Scrum process and its terminology because it may be encountered in the workplace. 

Scrum – An Alternative Management Process where the Team Leads Itself

Scrum (also a Rugby term) comes from an ‘Agile’ software development process that has been seen to be very effective in the software domain.  Its success has found its way into being applied to project development and not just software.  The fundamental basis of the Scrum process is that a ‘small’ (sometimes called ‘lean’ or ‘agile’) Team of cross-functional members, who have the skills to do the job, is empowered to lead itself with the responsibility to do the needed work.

Process Steps & A New Role for a Program Manager

Scrum – A brief introduction to Scrum and its defining key process steps are:

• Project work is iteratively accomplished by the Team
• The Team commits to take on ‘bursts of activity’ called ‘Sprints’ to produce prioritized product increments in ‘small’ periods of time
• The overall work is broken down into prioritized activities called ‘Stories’ by the Product Owner (the new role of the Program Manager)
• The Product Owner explains the Stories to the Team
• The Team then estimates the complexity of each Story
• The Team then determines which Story(s) they can commit to that defines what they will accomplish in a Sprint

Scrum – A Brief Introduction to SCRUM Terminology

In addition to Stories & Sprints, other terminologies associated with the process are:

1. ‘Product Backlog’ – All the work to complete a project broken down into ‘Stories’ or narrative descriptions of manageable activities, prioritized by what is most important to the customer. 
2. ‘Sprint Backlog’ – A pending amount of work (Stories) committed to be done in an agreed to time frame broken down further into tasks.
3. ‘Product Increment’ – The output of each Sprint is a ‘Product Increment’.
4. ‘Burn-down’ – The rate of completion of Sprints is the Burn-down of the effort. 
5. ‘Scrummaster’ – An independent person assigned to help remove obstacles and distractions so the Team remains focused on meeting its Sprint goal.
6. ‘Scrum Board’ – Literally a physical board whereby the Team often tracks and coordinates the Sprints on a daily basis by posting the Stories to the board and posting what was completed recently, what is to be completed next, and issues impacting work completion.

Sprint Completion & Reviews

Ultimately upon Sprint completions there are reviews with Stakeholders to describe, assess, and obtain feedback on what was delivered. 

This is a Scalable Process

Note: This is a Scalable Process:  Large projects can be subdivided into the sum of smaller activities each with small Teams so that the above process can be applied. 

The preceding is an excerpt from the high tech management guide.