Today, businesses are changing and their systems and
services must change quickly in order for them to stay competitive. The
traditional Waterfall development methodology demanded that all requirements,
design, and system testing be completed before our customers could interact
with the system. It has large impacts on the solution delivery schedule and is
costly when business changes may be required throughout the project life cycle.
A new methodology has selected and is implementing called
Agile Scrum by IT. This methodology is based on the interactive and incremental
development approach in short durations. It focuses on goals that result in
demonstrable product.
Here are some benefits to the Agile methodology:
- Provide working software code that is reviewed frequently (~ 2 weeks) by product owner.
- Work burn down and project velocity by using daily standing up to provide high visibility of project progress and issues.
- Improve customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of useful software and continuous collaboration between the product owners and the development team.
Product Owner is accountable for product success,
responsible for prioritizing product features, maintains the Product Backlog,
and ensures team working on highest valued features, etc.
The Scrum Master is a facilitator for the team and product
owner not a manager, removes obstacles, maintains the Sprint Burndown Chart,
facilitates Sprint Retrospective at the end of a Sprint, etc. Rather than
manage the team, the Scrum Master works to assist both the team and product
owner in the certain ways.
Scrum Team is cross-functional and consists of 5-9 people,
defines tasks and assignments, is self-organizing, maintains the Sprint
Backlog, etc.
User Stories: A very high definition of what the customer
wants the system to do. Each user story is captured as a separate item on the
Product Backlog.
Story Points: A simple way to initially estimate level of
effort expected to develop a user story. Story points are a relative measure of
feature difficulty, complexity, and risk.
Velocity: The rate at which a team converts items to “DONE”
in a single Sprint – usually calculated in Story Points.
Above are just briefly some important terminologies in Agile
Scrum that you must know to understand how Agile Scrum works.
Pic(AgileZen): Task board
However, there are a few biggest challenges in Scrum are
teams not self-organizing and Scrum Master managing and not leading. From my
experience, I see that most of Scrum Masters try to managing the team instead.
For example, in daily scrum meeting, team members should report each other, not
Scrum Master. But it doesn’t work that way. The Scrum Masters makes us feel
like they are managers, and everyone try to become a Scrum Master. Other thing
is that, team members don’t have a big picture of the whole project. With
Agile, team members should also have meetings with Product Owners regularly
(maybe weekly) to understand about the requirements, and have questions related
to the requirements if they are not clear enough. Here, we just hear from the
Scrum Master small parts by parts. Sometimes the Scrum Master doesn’t know all
the existing functionality, that cause the project moves slowly and behind
schedule.
The worst case is that when the Scrum Master or the tech
lead left for another company, team members are clueless.
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