Discover practical agile delivery techniques to make your software shine. Has your excitement over Scrum led to nothing but disappointment?
Have months of agile training still left your company far short of optimal efficiency? Do you feel like your leaders and developers are speaking a completely different language? After running successful agile teams on a daily basis, he's ready to share his insights and techniques to help your company reap the benefits of his experience. The Epic Guide to Agile: More Business Value on a Predictable Schedule with Scrum is a comprehensive guide to software-based team dynamics that both leaders and developers can understand.
Unlike most agile training that doesn't work in practice, Todaro's step-by-step playbook rises above theory to save you time and money. Perfect for any sized business or level of experience, you'll get to the crux of each Scrum issue to have your team running sprints more efficiently than ever. In The Epic Guide to Agile, you'll discover: Personal examples and anecdotes to tackle problems at their source Effective ways to introduce agile and Scrum into your organization with the right pilot team The exact system to achieve productive sprint planning sessions The typical issues that can doom your product and how to conquer them The best technical environment setups to support your software project groups and much, much, more!
If you like real-world examples, no-nonsense teaching, and clear communication, then you'll love Dave Todaro's extraordinary and practical guidebook. For those who believe that there must be a more agile and efficient way for people to get things done, here is a brilliantly discursive, thought-provoking book about the leadership and management process that is changing the way we live.
The thorny problem Jeff began tackling back then boils down to this: people are spectacularly bad at doing things with agility and efficiency. Best laid plans go up in smoke. Teams often work at cross purposes to each other.
And when the pressure rises, unhappiness soars. Drawing on his experience as a West Point-educated fighter pilot, biometrics expert, early innovator of ATM technology, and V. Woven with insights from martial arts, judicial decision making, advanced aerial combat, robotics, and many other disciplines, Scrum is consistently riveting. But the most important reason to read this book is that it may just help you achieve what others consider unachievable — whether it be inventing a trailblazing technology, devising a new system of education, pioneering a way to feed the hungry, or, closer to home, a building a foundation for your family to thrive and prosper.
Use scrum in all aspects of life Scrum is an agile project management framework that allows for flexibility and collaboration to be a part of your workflow.
Primarily used by software developers, scrum can be used across many job functions and industries. Scrum can also be used in your personal life to help you plan for retirement, a trip, or even a wedding or other big event. Scrum provides a small set of rules that create just enough structure for teams to be able to focus their innovation on solving what might otherwise be an insurmountable challenge.
Scrum For Dummies shows you how to assemble a scrum taskforce and use it to implement this popular Agile methodology to make projects in your professional and personal life run more smoothly—from start to finish.
Discover what scrum offers project and product teams Integrate scrum into your agile project management strategy Plan your retirement or a family reunion using scrum Prioritize for releases with sprints No matter your career path or job title, the principles of scrum are designed to make your life easier.
Why not give it a try? Improve your understanding of Scrum through the proven experience and collected wisdom of experts around the world. Based on real-life experiences, the 97 essays in this unique book provide a wealth of knowledge and expertise from established practitioners who have dealt with specific problems and challenges with Scrum.
This guide is an ideal resource for people new to Scrum and those who want to assess and improve their understanding of this framework. Just Use It As Is.
DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed.
Loved each and every part of this book. Being agile improves the effec. Reading this book not only helps the Scrum Teams to encourage their overall responsibility, accountability, and ownership, but also guides them to become High-Performing Scrum Teams.
It also gives an overview of Scrum Malfunctioning and various ways to prevent and correct it. By applying these techniques, they can also address the scope for a continuous improvement under the Sc.
Scrum is an Agile framework used to manage and execute projects with small teams. The Professional Scrum Master PSM I Guide will help you to explore the Scrum framework's rules and theories for Agile project management and develop skills that will enable you to become an indispensable resource for any organization.
You'll learn essential techniques and practices such as estimation, planning, and forecasting that will help you to apply Scrum successfully and complete complex projects with ease. The book also demonstrates how to conduct Scrum events, create Scrum artifacts, and tackle issues faced during the Scrum life cycle, among other practices. Finally, you will focus on various aspects of the PSM I certification course and discover expert advice, tips, and quizzes to prepare yourself for the exam.
By the end of the book, you will have gained fundamental knowledge of the Scrum framework, covered a range of topics related to the PSM I exam, and learned best practices, tips, and techniques to pass the exam confidently.
What you will learn Get to grips with Agile development and Scrum Understand the roles and responsibilities within the Scrum team Discover how to conduct Scrum events and create Scrum artifacts Find out how to estimate tasks and track progress Discover techniques for planning and forecasting Find out how to deal with issues face. This book will help project managersunravel a lot of the confusion that exists; develop a totally newperspective to see Agile and traditional plan-driven projectmanagement principles and practices in a new light as complementaryto each other rather than competitive; and learn to develop anadaptive approach to blend those principles and practices togetherin the right proportions to fit any situation.
The book includes discussion topics, real world casestudies, and sample enterprise-level agile frameworks tha. Working with LEGO and chocolate, using avatars, personas, and role cards, you will gain an understanding of the Dev and Ops roles as well as their interdependencies.
Throughout the game, players go through a range of emotions and learn to expand the boundaries of individual roles, acquire T-shaped skills, and grow the Scrum-team circle to include Operations. Scrum and Kanban are both agile approaches to development, and each has strengths and weaknesses that should be considered once you make sense of the domain in which you are operating.
In some organizations both Scrum and Kanban can be used to address the different system needs that coexist. For example, Scrum can be used for new-product development and Kanban for interrupt-driven support and maintenance. Closing Scrum is not a silver bullet or a magic cure. Scrum can, however, enable you to embrace the changes that accompany all complex product development efforts.
And it can, and has, worked for Genomica and many other companies that decided to employ an approach to software development that better matched their circumstances. Although the Scrum framework is simple, it would be a mistake to assume that Scrum is easy and painless to apply. These realizations can be painful for many organizations. However, if they move past the initial discomfort and work to solve the problems Scrum unearths, organizations can take great strides in terms of both their software development process and products and their levels of employee and customer satisfaction.
The rest of the book is devoted to discussing the essential aspects of Scrum. I will begin with a description of the entire Scrum framework, including its roles, activities, artifacts, and rules. Who knows; if you use Scrum in the right way and in the proper conditions, perhaps you too will deliver value as successfully as my wife did on that fateful day back in Subsequent chapters will provide a deeper treatment of each of these practices, including an in-depth look at the principles that underlie the practices.
Overview Scrum is not a standardized process where you methodically follow a series of sequential steps that are guaranteed to produce, on time and on budget, a high-quality product that delights customers. Instead, Scrum is a framework for organizing and managing work. The Scrum framework is based on a set of values, principles, and practices that provide the foundation to which your organization will add its unique implementation of relevant engineering practices and your specific approaches for realizing the Scrum practices.
The result will be a version of Scrum that is uniquely yours. To better grasp the framework concept, imagine that the Scrum framework is like the foundation and walls of a building.
The Scrum values, principles, and practices would be the key structural components. What you can do, however, is customize inside the structure of Scrum, adding fixtures and features until you have a process that works for you. Scrum is a refreshingly simple, people-centric framework based on the values of honesty, openness, courage, respect, focus, trust, empowerment, and collaboration. Chapter 3 will describe the Scrum principles in depth; subsequent chapters will highlight how specific practices and approaches are rooted in these principles and values.
The Scrum practices themselves are embodied in specific roles, activities, artifacts, and their associated rules see Figure 2. The remainder of this chapter will focus on Scrum practices. There can be other roles when using Scrum, but the Scrum framework requires only the three listed here.
The ScrumMaster is responsible for guiding the team in creating and following its own process based on the broader Scrum framework. The development team is responsible for determining how to deliver what the product owner has asked for. The Scrum framework defines just the roles that are specific to Scrum, not all of the roles that can and should exist within an organization that uses Scrum.
Product Owner The product owner is the empowered central point of product leadership. He1 is the single authority responsible for deciding which features and functionality to build and the order in which to build them. The product owner maintains and communicates to all other participants a clear vision of what the Scrum team is trying to achieve. As such, the product owner is responsible for the overall success of the solution being developed or maintained. See Chapter 9 for a detailed description of the product owner role.
ScrumMaster The ScrumMaster helps everyone involved understand and embrace the Scrum values, principles, and practices. She acts as a coach, providing process leadership and helping the Scrum team and the rest of the organization develop their own highperformance, organization-specific Scrum approach. At the same time, the ScrumMaster helps the organization through the challenging change management process that can occur during a Scrum adoption. As a facilitator, the ScrumMaster helps the team resolve issues and make improvements to its use of Scrum.
She is also responsible for protecting the team from outside interference and takes a leadership role in removing impediments that inhibit team productivity when the individuals themselves cannot reasonably resolve them.
The ScrumMaster has no authority to exert control over the team, so this role is not the same as the traditional role of project manager or development manager. The ScrumMaster functions as a leader, not a manager. I will discuss the roles of functional manager and project manager in Chapter See Chapter 10 for more details on the ScrumMaster role.
Development Team Traditional software development approaches discuss various job types, such as architect, programmer, tester, database administrator, UI designer, and so on.
Scrum defines the role of a development team, which is simply a diverse, cross-functional collection of these types of people who are responsible for designing, building, and testing the desired product. The development team self-organizes to determine the best way to accomplish the goal set out by the product owner. The development team is typically five to nine people in size; its members must collectively have all of the skills needed to produce goodquality, working software.
Of course, Scrum can be used on development efforts that require much larger teams. However, rather than having one Scrum team with, say, 35 people, there would more likely be four or more Scrum teams, each with a development team of nine or fewer people. See Chapter 11 for more details on the development team role and Chapter 12 for more details on coordinating multiple teams.
Scrum Activities and Artifacts Figure 2. The product owner has a vision of what he wants to create the big cube. Because the cube can be large, through an activity called grooming it is broken down into a set of features that are collected into a prioritized list called the product backlog. A sprint starts with sprint planning, encompasses the development work during the sprint called sprint execution , and ends with the review and retrospective.
The sprint is represented by the large, looping arrow that dominates the center of the figure. The number of items in the product backlog is likely to be more than a development team can complete in a short-duration sprint.
For that reason, at the beginning of each sprint, the development team must determine a subset of the product backlog items it believes it can complete—an activity called sprint planning, shown just to the right of the large product backlog cube. Advocates of the word forecast like it because they feel that although the development team is making the best estimate that it can at the time, the estimate might change as more information becomes known during the course of the sprint.
I agree that all development teams should generate a forecast estimate of what they can deliver each sprint. Commitments support mutual trust between the product owner and the development team as well as within the development team. Also, commitments support reasonable short-term planning and decision making within an organization. And, when performing multiteam product development, commitments support synchronized planning—one team can make decisions based on what another team has committed to do.
In this book, I favor the term commitment; however, I occasionally use forecast if it seems correct in context. To acquire confidence that the development team has made a reasonable commitment, the team members create a second backlog during sprint planning, called the sprint backlog.
The sprint backlog describes, through a set of detailed tasks, how the team plans to design, build, integrate, and test the selected subset of features from the product backlog during that particular sprint.
Next is sprint execution, where the development team performs the tasks necessary to realize the selected features. Each day during sprint execution, the team members help manage the flow of work by conducting a synchronization, inspection, and adaptive planning activity known as the daily scrum. The Scrum team completes the sprint by performing two inspect-and-adapt activities. In the first, called the sprint review, the stakeholders and Scrum team inspect the product being built.
In the second, called the sprint retrospective, the Scrum team inspects the Scrum process being used to create the product. At this point the Scrum sprint cycle repeats, beginning anew with the development team determining the next most important set of product backlog items it can complete. In the remainder of this chapter I will discuss each of these activities and artifacts in greater detail. Product Backlog Using Scrum, we always do the most valuable work first.
The product owner, with input from the rest of the Scrum team and stakeholders, is ultimately responsible for determining and managing the sequence of this work and communicating it in the form of a prioritized or ordered list known as the product backlog see Figure 2.
For ongoing product development, the product backlog might also contain new features, changes to existing features, defects needing repair, technical improvements, and so on. The product owner collaborates with internal and external stakeholders to gather and define the product backlog items.
The product backlog is a constantly evolving artifact. Overall the activity of creating and refining product backlog items, estimating them, and prioritizing them is known as grooming see Figure 2.
The argument was that prioritizing is simply one form of ordering and, according to some, not even the most appropriate form of ordering. The issue of how to best sequence items in the product backlog, however, is influenced by many factors, and a single word may never capture the full breadth and depth of the concept.
Although there may be theoretical merit to the ordered-versusprioritized debate, most people including me use the terms interchangeably when discussing the items in the product backlog. Before we finalize prioritizing, ordering, or otherwise arranging the product backlog, we need to know the size of each item in the product backlog see Figure 2. Scrum does not dictate which, if any, size measure to use with product backlog items.
In practice, many teams use a relative size measure such as story points or ideal days. A relative size measure expresses the overall size of an item in such a way that the absolute value is not considered, but the relative size of an item compared to other items is considered.
For example, in Figure 2. What we can conclude is that feature E is about four times larger than feature C. I will discuss these measures further in Chapter 7. Sprints In Scrum, work is performed in iterations or cycles of up to a calendar month called sprints see Figure 2. The work completed in each sprint should create something of tangible value to the customer or user. Sprints are timeboxed so they always have a fixed start and end date, and generally they should all be of the same duration.
A new sprint immediately follows the completion of the previous sprint. As a rule we do not permit any goal-altering changes in scope or personnel during a sprint; however, business needs sometimes make adherence to this rule impossible. I will describe sprints in more detail in Chapter 4. To determine the most important subset of product backlog items to build in the next sprint, the product owner, development team, and ScrumMaster perform sprint planning see Figure 2. During sprint planning, the product owner and development team agree on a sprint goal that defines what the upcoming sprint is supposed to achieve.
To acquire confidence in what it can get done, many development teams break down each targeted feature into a set of tasks. The collection of these tasks, along with their associated product backlog items, forms a second backlog called the sprint backlog see Figure 2. The development team then provides an estimate typically in hours of the effort required to complete each task.
Breaking product backlog items into tasks is a form of design and just-in-time planning for how to get the features done. Most Scrum teams performing sprints of two weeks to a month in duration try to complete sprint planning in about four to eight hours. A one-week sprint should take no more than a couple of hours to plan and probably less. During this time there are several approaches that can be used. The approach I use most often follows a simple cycle: Select a product backlog item whenever possible, the next-most-important item as defined by the product owner , break the item down into tasks, and determine if the selected item will reasonably fit within the sprint in combination with other items targeted for the same sprint.
If it does fit and there is more capacity to complete work, repeat the cycle until the team is out of capacity to do any more work. The development team alone does the task breakdowns to confirm that it really can deliver all of the selected product backlog items. I will describe each approach in more detail in Chapter Exactly what tasks the team performs depends of course on the nature of the work for example, are we building software and what type of software, or are we building hardware, or is this marketing work?
Nobody tells the development team in what order or how to do the task-level work in the sprint backlog. Instead, team members define their own task-level work and then self-organize in any manner they feel is best for achieving the sprint goal.
See Chapter 20 for more details on sprint execution. Daily Scrum Each day of the sprint, ideally at the same time, the development team members hold a timeboxed 15 minutes or less daily scrum see Figure 2. This inspect-andadapt activity is sometimes referred to as the daily stand-up because of the common practice of everyone standing up during the meeting to help promote brevity. Sprint execution takes up the majority of time spent in each sprint Sprint backlog Sprint execution Each feature has a set of tasks that the team performs in order to complete that feature FIGURE 2.
The daily scrum is essential for helping the development team manage the fast, flexible flow of work within a sprint.
The daily scrum is not a problem-solving activity. Rather, many teams decide to talk about problems after the daily scrum and do so with a small group of interested people. A daily scrum, however, can be useful to communicate the status of sprint backlog items among the development team members. Mainly, the daily scrum is an inspection, synchronization, and adaptive daily planning activity that helps a selforganizing team do its job better.
At the daily scrum, only the pigs should talk; the chickens, if any, should attend as observers. Not everyone agrees. The metaphor of pigs and chickens breaks down if you try to apply it within a Scrum team.
Done In Scrum, we refer to the sprint results as a potentially shippable product increment see Figure 2. For example, when developing software, a bare-minimum definition of done should yield a complete slice of product functionality that is designed, built, integrated, tested, and documented. An aggressive definition of done enables the business to decide each sprint if it wants to ship or deploy or release what got built to internal or external customers.
As a practical matter, over time some teams may vary the definition of done. For example, in the early stages of game development, having features that are potentially shippable might not be economically feasible or desirable given the exploratory nature of early game development. In these situations, an appropriate definition of done might be a slice of product functionality that is sufficiently functional and usable to generate feedback that enables the team to decide what work should be done next or how to do it.
See Chapter 4 for more details on the definition of done. Sprint Review At the end of the sprint there are two additional inspect-and-adapt activities. One is called the sprint review see Figure 2. The goal of this activity is to inspect and adapt the product that is being built. Critical to this activity is the conversation that takes place among its participants, which include the Scrum team, stakeholders, sponsors, customers, and interested members of other teams.
The conversation is focused on reviewing the just-completed features in the context of the overall development effort. Everyone in attendance gets clear visibility into what is occurring and has an opportunity to help guide the forthcoming development to ensure that the most business-appropriate solution is created.
A successful review results in bidirectional information flow. At the same time, the Scrum team members gain a deeper appreciation for the business and marketing side of their product by getting frequent feedback on the convergence of the product toward delighted customers or users.
The sprint review therefore represents a scheduled opportunity to inspect and adapt the product. See Chapter 21 for more details on the sprint review. Sprint Retrospective The second inspect-and-adapt activity at the end of the sprint is the sprint retrospective see Figure 2.
This activity frequently occurs after the sprint review and before the next sprint planning. Whereas the sprint review is a time to inspect and adapt the product, the sprint retrospective is an opportunity to inspect and adapt the process. The focus is on the continuous process improvement necessary to help a good Scrum team become great. At the end of a sprint retrospective the Scrum team should have identified and committed to a practical number of process improvement actions that will be undertaken by the Scrum team in the next sprint.
See Chapter 22 for details on the sprint retrospective. After the sprint retrospective is completed, the whole cycle is repeated again— starting with the next sprint-planning session, held to determine the current highestvalue set of work for the team to focus on.
There are other practices, such as higher-level planning and progress-tracking practices, that many Scrum teams use. These will be described in subsequent chapters. In the next chapter, I will provide a description of the core principles on which Scrum is based.
This will facilitate the deeper exploration of the Scrum framework in subsequent chapters. This chapter describes the agile principles that underlie Scrum and compares them with those of traditional, plan-driven, sequential product development. In doing so, the chapter sets the stage for understanding how Scrum differs from more traditional forms of product development and for a more detailed analysis of Scrum practices in subsequent chapters.
Doing so makes it easier for people to understand how Scrum is similar to or different from something they know and understand. The goal of comparing agile principles with traditional development principles is not to make the case that plan-driven, sequential development is bad and that Scrum is good.
As I described briefly in the context of the Cynefin framework in Chapter 1, Scrum and traditional, plan-driven, sequential development are appropriate to use on different classes of problems. By taking this perspective when describing traditional development, I am better able to draw out the distinctions and more clearly illustrate the principles that underlie Scrum-based development.
One pure form of traditional, plan-driven development frequently goes by the term waterfall see Figure 3. However, that is just one example of a broader class of plan-driven processes also known as traditional, sequential, anticipatory, predictive, or prescriptive development processes. Plan-driven processes are so named because they attempt to plan for and anticipate up front all of the features a user might want in the end product, and to determine how best to build those features.
The idea here is that the better the planning, the better the understanding, and therefore the better the execution. The problem is that most product development efforts are anything but predictable, especially at the beginning.
So, while a plan-driven process gives the impression of an orderly, accountable, and measurable approach, that impression can lead to a false sense of security. After all, developing a product rarely goes as planned. For many, a plan-driven, sequential process just makes sense, understand it, design it, code it, test it, and deploy it, all according to a well-defined, prescribed plan. There is a belief that it should work. Even if a plan-driven process repeatedly produces disappointing results, many organizations continue to apply the same approach, sure that if they just do it better, their results will improve.
The problem, however, is not with the execution. Scrum, on the other hand, is based on a different set of beliefs—ones that do map well to problems with enough uncertainty to make high levels of predictability difficult. The principles that I describe in this chapter are drawn from a number of sources, including the Agile Manifesto Beck et al.
These principles are organized into several categories as shown in Figure 3. This is followed by a discussion of principles that deal with balancing up-front prediction with just-in-time adaptation. Then, I discuss principles focused on learning, followed by principles for managing the work in process. I conclude by focusing on progress and performance principles. Variability and Uncertainty Scrum leverages the variability and uncertainty in product development to create innovative solutions.
Neukrug, R. Dean Webb, Arlene Metha, K. Pride, Robert J. Hughes, Jack R. Bast, Margie A. Pride, O. Eide M. You can also freely print the book.
If you want to read online the Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process Addison-Wesley Signature Series Cohn we also provide a facility that can be read through your notebook, netbook, ipad, kindle, tablet and mobile phone.
0コメント