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
1
The Product Owner
populates and
prioritizes the
Product Backlog.
5
3
During the Sprint the Team executes on
work items, and holds daily status
meetings called Scrums.
4
2
The Team moves the highestpriority work items they can
work on now from the Product
Backlog to the Sprint Backlog.
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.
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).
6
Very shortly later, the
Team applies what they
learned to the planning
of the next Sprint.
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, www.scrumalliance.org,
for training and Scrum Master certification
(see especially Schwaber’s Scrum Guide)
• Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Ken
Schwaber