*Scrum roles,
*Scrum process,
*and Scrum artifacts.
Roles:
The Scrum team typically is a cross‐functional team of consists of five to ten people who work on the project full time.
The Scrum Master is the role traditionally assumed by a project manager of team leader. This person is responsible for several things, perhaps the most important of which are enacting the Scrum values and practices and removing impediments.
The product owner is typically a functional unit manager who knows what needs to be built to enable the project and how the sequence of builds should progress.
The Scrum process:
The Scrum process has five major activities:
The sprint planning meeting,
The kickoff,
The sprint,
The daily Scrum,
and The sprint review meeting.
The sprint planning meeting is a meeting of the Scrum team, the Scrum master, and the product owner at the beginning of each sprint (iteration).
These meetings, which may take up to a day, consist of two parts. In the first part of the meeting, two major activities occur. First, the group defines the product backlog, which is basically a list of the project requirements. After this, the group determines the sprint goal, which is the formal outcome(s) from this particular sprint. In the second part of the meeting, the focus of work is on creating the sprint backlog.
The kickoff meeting is structured similarly to the sprint planning meeting with the major difference being that the group define the high‐level backlog for the project and the major project goals.
The sprint, Once the sprint planning meeting has been held, the sprint can begin. Sprints differ from phases in a traditional project in that sprints are limited to a month‐long iteration cycle in which time the functionality of the product is further developed. Another differentiating factor is that during a sprint, no outside influence should be allowed to interfere with the work of the Scrum team. This has several potential implications with the most important being that project requirements cannot be changed during a sprint.
The daily Scrum, In many projects, but not all, each sprint begins with a daily Scrum meeting. This meeting, typically lasting no more than 15 minutes, is held every day between the Scrum master (who chairs the meeting) and the Scrum team. In this meeting, every team member briefly answers three questions:
- What did you do since the last Scrum?
- What are you doing until the next Scrum?
- What is stopping you getting on with your work?
While it might not be evident, the daily Scrum is not a problem solving session and is not really designed to be a way of collecting information about who (or what) is behind schedule. Instead, the purpose of the daily Scrum is to both track the progress of the team as well as allow team members to make commitments to each other and the Scrum master so that work can proceed in the most expedient and unimpeded manner.
Scrum artifacts, The last major component of the Scrum model is the Scrum artifacts that include the product backlog, the sprint backlog, and burn down charts. The product backlog is the requirements for the project expressed as a prioritized list of backlog items. Unlike a traditional project, this list is managed and owned by the product owner. This list can be created using project management software (like MS‐Project) but can just as effectively be created as a spreadsheet. In most projects, the product backlog is a major deliverable of the kickoff or spring planning meetings. As is the case with sprints, the product backlog cannot be changed until the next sprint planning meeting.
