How Scrum Works

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Sprint Planning

  • The team decides what the team wants to accomplish for the next sprint.

  • The Product Owner picks the high priority items and answers any doubts from the business perspective.

  • The developers estimate the effort the develop these items, based on which the Product Owner decides if the item goes back into the Product Backlog.

  • Then together, they move tasks and stories to the Sprint Backlog, in order to meet the sprint’s goal. It has to be feasible to complete the sprint in the time frame of around two weeks.

  • Once they all agree on the items that go into the Spring Backlog, the developers break these items into tasks.

  • Each task should not last more than a day to be developed, including automated tests. This is a very important point to achieve Continuous Delivery which occurs daily!

Daily Scrum

  • Once this has been decided and a sprint has started, there is a daily stand-up meeting,

  • It is a very short meeting (around 15 minutes) that happens at the same time and same place every day.

  • The goal of the daily scrum is to get everyone on the same page and to voice concerns about issues any team members face to achieve their sprint goal.

Sprint Review

  • At the end of the sprint, the team gets together for a sprint review with any stakeholders.

  • This is an informal session to see what was accomplished.

  • The development team shows the backlog items that have been finished to the Product Owner, who approves them for the release.

  • The Product Owner also reworks the backlog based on the current sprint, as a starting point for the next sprint planning session.

An important point to note here is that a release (which occurs at least once a day, typically more frequently) is NOT related to the Sprint Review (which roughly takes two weeks).

Sprint Retrospective

  • At the end of a sprint, the team comes together to document what worked well and what didn’t work well.

  • It’s not so much about arguing what didn’t work well but to provide a safe space for the team to talk about what went well and what can be improved going forward.