Scrum in 30 minutes! Oddly, a 45-minute presentation by Carl Chatfield Content Project Manager, Microsoft Puget Sound MPUG September 2009

A Very Short Definition of Scrum Scrum is a tactically focused work management framework for small teams. Scrum prescribes a set of practices for defining work and deliverables, roles for team members and other stakeholders, and artifacts in which to capture information. Scrum is arguably the most generic of the agile software development methodologies.

How A Team Practices Scrum The Product Owner populates and prioritizes the Product Backlog. The Team moves the highest- priority work items they can work on now from the Product Backlog to the Sprint Backlog. During the Sprint the Team executes on work items, and holds daily status meetings called Scrums. At Sprint’s end the Team presents their completed work to customers or other stakeholders (Sprint Review), and captures lessons learned during the sprint (Retrospective). Very shortly later, the Team applies what they learned to the planning of the next Sprint At each Scrum the Scrum Master records work completed and estimated remaining work per work item, and escalates any blocking issues the Team cannot resolve. 4

Tips For Working With An Engineering Team Practicing Scrum Trade away detailed written specifications for informal, frequent interactions (a challenge for geographically remote teams) Get your dependencies on the engineering team onto their sprint backlogs If you are also using Scrum, communicate your process to your engineers

How You Can Improve (Or Disband) Your Team With Scrum Scrum will bring to light—but not necessarily solve—problems with organizational power, trust, competence and accountability Take the sprint retrospective seriously—after a few sprints, your team should improve its estimating skills Rotate the scrum master role between team members

Managing Scrum in Project What applies Resource capacity: – Working time (Project calendar) – Nonworking time per resource Sprints as summary tasks and work items as tasks Recorded actuals and remaining work per resource, per work item What doesn’t apply Detailed task definitions or dependencies within a sprint Most schedule calculations that affect finish dates Cost calculations

More on Scrum The Scrum Alliance, for training and Scrum Master certification (see especially Schwaber’s Scrum Guide) Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Ken Schwaber