SCRUM " The Process"

SCRUM "The Process"

"Out of the box". Most projects have a list of requirements, Scrum records requirements in a Product Backlog. Requirements need not be detailed nor do they need to be described fully. As with most projects, the requirements are sourced from the expected users or "the business". The Product Owner prioritizes the Product Backlog: items of importance to the project/business, i.e. those items that add immediate and significant business value, are bubbled up to the top.

The Project Team responsible for doing the actual work then creates a Sprint Backlog: this comprises of Product Backlog items that they believe can be completed within a 15 day period. The Project Team may liaise with the Product Owner and others in order to expand item(s) on the Sprint Backlog. After 15 days have elapsed, the team should have a "potentially shippable product increment". I will discuss the make-up of the Project Team later in this article, under the topic: Scrum Roles.

The Product Owner, the ScrumMaster and the Project Team will make an initial pass over the Product Backlog items where they work out roughly how long each item will take. Initially, these are estimates, best guesses. As time progresses, well within 15 days, we’ll know if the estimate was even close.

Scrum lets us refine our estimates on-the-fly: if we believe that a task will take longer than imagined, we have the ability to say so before the tasks starts. By only ever working with small work packages (time-boxed to 15 days), any schedule/requirement issues are dealt with as soon as they are identified, not much further downstream where the cost of recovery is considerably higher.

What does this "potentially shippable product increment" actually mean? Put simply, every 15 days, the team should provide something of value to the business, something they can use or something that provides considerable direction.