Your Guide To Get Started With Scrum Methodology

There are many agile methodologies that are based on those values and principles. One of them is Scrum, and statistics show that more than 65% of agile teams use scrum as their main methodology to manage their projects. Scrum is an agile methodology in which the project is divided into small iterations, each iteration has a length of 1 to 4 weeks. Scrum has many activities & roles, let’s understand each of them separately.

Scrum Goals

Let’s begin with the three main scrum goals which are “Product Owner-Scrum Master-Development Team.”

Product owner

The product owner represents the client. He is the one responsible for writing requirements in the form of the “Product Backlog”. He also answers any questions the customer or the development team has in terms of the requirements.

Scrum master

The scrum master is like a coach that helps the team in applying scrum principles correctly. He should know scrum deeply and be able to remove obstacles that prevent team members from progressing.

Development Team

The development team develops and tests the software. So, in scrum teams, the tester is part of the development team or the scrum team.

Requirements

In scrum projects, we have different levels of requirements which are: “Product backlog-Release backlog-Sprint backlog-Epic-User story”

User Stories

So how does the team manage the user requirements in Scrum projects?
The requirements in scrum projects are written in the form of user stories. The user story is a document that captures user requirements in the form of “As a …….., I want ……, so that I can ……”
An example user story for the login function can be: As a new user, I want to be able to register to the website so that I can use its features. Each user story comes with acceptance criteria that must be met for the user story to be done.

Example acceptance criteria for the registration user story can be:
Users can register using a valid phone number or email
The password field must be at least six digits, alphanumeric, and begins with a capital letter

Product backlog

This is a document that includes all user stories in the project. It might take the team a whole year to develop and test all features in the product backlog. The product owner writes the product backlog

Release backlog

Release backlog is the part of the product backlog which the team will develop within the next months “Mostly three months”.

Sprint backlog

Sprint backlog includes features that the team will work on within the next iteration “One to four weeks”. Each sprint should result in a potentially shippable product. The whole team -not the product owner- decide what will be developed within the next iteration(sprint).

Epic

The epic is a large user story that will need a long time to be developed and tested. So for example, if there is a functionality that will require 16 hours to be developed, then we consider it as an epic and then divide it into 3 or 4 user stories. Each requires around 4 hours to be finished.

Planning

Next, we need to discuss planning in scrum projects. We have many types of planning in scrum projects. We will discuss them now.

Planning poker

The planning poker is an activity held at the beginning of each sprint so that we estimate the effort and time required for each user story to be developed, tested, and integrated.
In planning poker, the product owner reads a user story, then each team member estimates the amount of effort required for this user story individually. If the estimate of all team members is the same, then this is the correct estimate for this user story. If the estimate of each team member is different, then team members discuss the reasons that made them make this estimate and repeat the session until they reach an agreed estimate.

Daily stand-up meeting

Every day, the whole scrum team meets and discusses their progress. Each team member talks about three points:
-What he did yesterday
-What he is going to do today
-Any issues that block his progress towards reaching his goal today

Sprint review meeting

The sprint review meeting is a meeting held at the end of each sprint. In this meeting, the team discusses the features that were developed in this sprint. Did they achieve their goals? Are all customer requirements fulfilled?

Retrospective Meeting

The retrospective meeting is like the review meeting. It is held at the end of the sprint, but its goal is different that the goal of the review meeting. The main goal of the retrospective meeting is for the agile team to retrospect on itself. Three main questions are answered during the retrospective meeting:

1. What went well during the sprint? [So that the team keeps doing it]
2. What went bad during the sprint? [So that the team stops doing it]
3. What activities be added so that the team increases its productivity?