Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber
Overview
Agile borrows the concept of Empirical Process Control (visibility, inspection, adaptation) for managing complex activities.
Visibility : Aspects of the process that affect the outcome must be visible
Inspection: The various aspects of the process must be inspected frequently enough by experts
Adaptation: The adjustment must be made as quickly as possible to minimize further deviation.
There are only three Scrum roles: the Product Owner, the Team, and the ScrumMaster. All management responsibilities in a project are divided among these three roles.
The Product Owner achieves initial and ongoing funding for the project by creating the project’s initial overall requirements, return on investment (ROI) objectives, and release plans. The list of requirements is called the Product Backlog. The Product Owner is responsible for using the Product Backlog to ensure that the most valuable functionality is produced first and built upon; this is achieved by frequently prioritizing the Product Backlog to queue up the most valuable requirements for the next iteration.
The Team is responsible for developing functionality. Teams are self-managing, self-organizing, and cross-functional, and they are responsible for figuring out how to turn Product Backlog into an increment of functionality within an iteration.
The ScrumMaster is responsible for making sure that all the pieces of the Scrum process come together and work as a whole. The responsibilities of the ScrumMasters can be summarized as follows:
- Remove the barriers between development and the Product Owner so that the Product Owner directly drives development.
- Improve the productivity of the development team in any way possible.
- Improve the engineering practices and tools so that each increment of functionality is potentially shippable.
- Keep information about the team’s progress up-to-date and visible to all parties.
The Product Owner had learned to talk in terms of business requirements and objectives, whereas the Team had learned to speak in terms of technology. Because the Product Owner is unlikely to learn the technology, one of the main jobs of the ScrumMaster is to teach the Team to talk in terms of business needs and objectives. The common denominator between the Team and the Product Owner is the Product Backlog.
The product backlog helps meet customers’ needs by periodically re-adjusting requirements based on customers’ feedback from using the software produced at the end of iteration.
Agile relies on Scrum development model. Scrum contains iteration which are called sprint. Sprint is time-boxed and the output of each sprint is an increment of product. Scrum is structured to regularly make the state of the project visible to the Product Owner, the ScrumMaster, and the Team—so that they can rapidly adjust the project to best meet its goals.
How Agile reduces complexity
- Ask team to focus on just the next 30 calendar days. Take one piece of functionality and figure out how to make it work. Forget the rest of the release and to focus on a few concrete steps
- Staff the teams so that all the expertise necessary to develop a piece of functionality was included within each team.
How to present ROI
Use financial data to offer options that the product owner can understand. With the financial data in hand, various alternatives could be posited and a rational decision made.
Keep things visible
Scrum works only if everything is kept visible for frequent inspection and adaptation. To be empirical, everyone must know that about which they are inspecting. Practices such as the Sprint review meeting, the Daily Scrum, the Sprint Backlog, and the Product Backlog keep everything visible for inspection.
The ScrumMaster must keep everything visible at a meaningful level of detail. A ScrumMaster must be vigilant. If the ScrumMaster is unclear about what’s going on, so is everyone else. Make sure everything is visible. Find a way to make Scrum understandable to everyone in his or her vocabulary.enter
