Slightly larger than bite-sized introduction to Scrum

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Scrum in a
Coconut Shell
Jon McNestrie

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Introduction to Scrum
Scrum is a simple yet incredibly powerful
set of principles and practices that help
teams deliver products in short cycles,
enabling fast feedback, continual
improvement, and rapid adaptation to
change.
Scrum in a Coconut Shell

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Waterfall
Requirements
Design
Development
Testing
Scrum in a Coconut Shell

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The Agile Manifesto
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value
the items on the left more.
Scrum in a Coconut Shell

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Empirical Process Control
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Transparency Inspection Adaptation

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The Iron Triangle
Features
Time Cost
Quality
Features
Time Cost
Quality
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In a Nutshell
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A Sprint
• Work is carried out in a series of
time-boxed iterations (typically 2-4 weeks)
• The goal of each Sprint is to produce a ‘Potentially
Shippable Product’, incrementally better than the
previous Sprint.
• A Sprint should be stable
• Duration
• Team members
• Scope
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Roles in Scrum
Product Owner
• Responsible for
the product
• Owns the
backlog
• Respects the
team and
process
Dev Team
• Self organising
• Cross functional
• Everyone is
accountable for
the success of
the team
ScrumMaster
• Facilitates the process and
protects the team
• A Servant Leader
• Not the boss!
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Scrum Meetings
Scrum in a Coconut Shell
Planning
• What are we
going to do and
how are we
going to do it?
• Backlog items
are accepted by
the team
Retrospective
• The most
important ritual
• All about the
process, not
about the
requirements /
product
Review
• Sometimes referred to as ‘Demo’; a lot
more to the review
• Also includes accepting completed work,
feedback, discussions of upcoming work

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Product Backlog
• An ordered list of features that need to be
delivered to create or enhance the product
• The highest value items and the items
containing most risk should move towards
the top
Scrum Backlogs
Scrum in a Coconut Shell
Sprint Backlog
• Product Backlog Items that have
been accepted into the current
Sprint
• Includes the ‘How’; the tasks that
have been created to deliver the
PBIs

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Daily Stand-up
• Every day, same time, same
place, the team gather
• The team assesses progress
• Could be just three simple questions
• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you doing today?
• Is anything ‘blocking’ you?
• Alternatively ‘walk the board’
• The team gains a good understanding of who is
doing what and works towards the shared goal
• Detailed discussions are dealt with elsewhere
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The Board and the Burndown
Scrum in a Coconut Shell
• Tracking progress
during a Sprint is
crucial
• The Burndown
chart tracks remaining effort, not work done
• The team should strive to complete what has been
committed to and stay under the line!

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Definition of Done
• What do you actually mean when you
say a feature is done?
• Different people think different things…..
• A shared understanding is very powerful
• A team’s definition of done will evolve over time
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User Stories
As a ___________ I want__________
so that ___________.
• Wherever possible should be your (real) end users
• Acceptance criteria
• These are not the requirements! Documentation
and testing do not go away
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Estimates – Story Points
• All about estimating the relative size of different
pieces of work
• Start off with a small, well understood piece of
work and assign it a low value
• Estimate more items by comparing back to what
you have already estimated
• The team quickly builds up a shared understanding
of what your points mean; “That’s definitely an 8”
• Story points allow team members of different levels
of experience and different skills to contribute
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Planning Poker
• During estimation a small subset of
the team usually end up leading
• These might be the people who seem to
have the most experience or knowledge
• Everyone has a unique perspective to offer and
traditional planning often causes everyone to
‘follow the leader’
• Planning poker uses a modified Fibonacci sequence
for available story points
• It’s the ‘rock paper scissors’ of the estimating world
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Tools
• Post Its, Index Cards, Pens and a big wall!
• Not always practical
• A number of tools allow you to manage a backlog,
track progress and easily share
and update the information
• JIRA, TFS…. even Trello
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...Above All Else
• Remember that we are building software for a user
• You will never have the perfect process
• All you can do is inspect, adapt and seek to get a
little better each time
• Always try to understand why you’re doing things
and never blindly follow ‘The Process’
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• The Agile Manifesto http://agilemanifesto.org/
• Excellent books by Mike Cohn
• Agile Estimating and Planning
• Succeeding with Agile
• Scrum Alliance www.scrumalliance.org
Some Resources
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Acknowledgements
• Thanks to Dave Hicks from Agil8
• Thanks Mike Cohn from Mountain Goat Software
• Visual AGILExicon images ©2012 Kenneth S Rubin
and Innolution LLC. All rights reserved. Learn more
about the Visual AGILExicon at:
www.innolution.com/resources/visual-agilexicon
• Presentation ©2017 Northern Shore Consulting
Limited. www.northernshoreconsulting.co.uk
Scrum in a Coconut Shell