Status: being written

What is Scrum?

First lets take a look at the ingredients. The video below gives a very good overview in only 8 minuttes but unfortunately it has one flaw and a couple of ommisions (nothing is perfect!) which I'll get detail below.

The flaw in the video is that it says you can do away with the daily Scrum meeting in experienced teams. The ommisions are the impediment list and the retrospective review. Both will be explained in details below.

Scrum Ingredients

  • Product backlog:
  • Sprint backlog:
  • Sprint:
  • Impediment list:
  • Product Owner
  • Scrum Master
  • Team (developers, tester)
  • User stories
  • Estimates (planing poker)
  • Team velocity
  • Burndown chart
  • Daily meeting
  • Scrum board
  • The Retrospective meeting
  • Self organizing team
  • Sprint planning meeting
  • Sprint Review Meeting

Product Backlog:

It all starts with the Product backlog. This is a list of all the features and properties of the program you need.

XXX Show product backlog example XXX

This can be described in many ways but is preferred written as user stories. The product backlog belongs to the Product owner (one of the three Scrum roles) but anybody can add user stories to the product backlog.

XXX Show example of user story here XXX

As I said anybody can add stories to the Product Backlog but only the Product owner can prioritize it hence the PO has full control over the product. If anybody can add something and the PO doesn’t like it he can simply assign a low priority to the story so it may be developed last or not at all. The PO can stop the development when he decides the product has enough features. I’ll explain how this is possible in the sprint.

Why is it that everybody can add stories to the Product Backlog? Not all ideas are good but if you have no ideas you have nothing. Everybody should be able to publish ideas without being afraid of criticism (read The seven thinking hats for more info). If you can publish ideas without fear of criticism you will get a lot more ideas. Why not tell the PO about the idea? Because the PO is a human being with an opinion. If he does not like the idea he will not put it on the PBL. He thinks it is a waste of time. But what we want to rescue is the ideas that are good but come in a - not so good - wrapping. If the idea is on the PBL somebody else will see it and might understand the idea and explain it further. Some ideas are simply bad and will never make it. They will never get a high prioritize and that is it. So put simply we want all ideas to get published because we want to identify the good ideas that suffer from bad presentation.

So, in short: The product Backlog is a list of user stories or features that make of the program. The Team (another of the three Scrum roles consisting of developers, tester etc.) will go through the PBL and estimate how long each story will take to develop. This is vital to do so the PO can prioritize the list. More on estimates later.