What is meant by Scrum Principles?
Scrum principles are the base or the underlying foundation for the scrum agile framework. The scrum principles, when incorporated with the agile core values, helps to improve transparency and adaptation in the project management. Scrum principles and values are the guidelines that are followed to structure and strengthen the Scrum framework. Scrum is a very popular and widely used methodology used for agile product development or agile software development. Scrum is focused on the association, functioning software, team anticipation, and the flexibility to adapt to emerging project or organization requirements. Scrum is an agile method or framework for implementing the agile software development life cycle. Scrum is based on team anticipation and alliance of the cross-functional teams involved in the project management.
Why Scrum Principle and Scrum Agile Methodology?
In scum agile methodology, the scrum development team is the boss as the team knows the best way to deploy the product development and to deliver the best. Scrum comprises of short “sprint” methods to achieve a successful project or product development and implementation. Scrum methodology is applicable to projects which consist of approximately 10 team members and is driven as per short cycles with daily scrum meetings, which are controlled and led by a Scrum master operating within the agile framework. Scrum methodology is most widely applied in software development projects. Also, the Scrum framework can be applied to other business changes which are susceptible to real-time changes.
Scrum development begins with the initial sprint planning, where the agile team members identify the requirements and tasks they can commit to and then develop or create a sprint backlog which is nothing but a detailed list of the tasks to be performed during the sprint execution. A sprint lasts for 2-3 weeks, and there is a scrum meeting on each day of the sprint to track and monitor the project progress. The product prototype or the functionalities of the product is tested, and the prototype is released to collect feedback from the customers and the stakeholders for the improvement actions. The improvement actions are implemented in the next sprint.
Important Principles of Scrum
Following are the important scrum principles that are followed and incorporated while deploying a project:
- Customer Satisfaction is the top priority. Higher customer satisfaction is achieved through continuous and faster project delivery. A happy customer is a satisfied customer, and a satisfied customer is achieved through the continuous delivery of the product or the software.
- Changes and improvements are invited and welcomed even at a later stage in the product development process for delivering the best in class service. This reduces the rigidity of the process and improves flexibility in terms of adapting to the changes.
- A working prototype is delivered at the end of every iteration, and the project is delivered on or before the decided timeline, which again enhances customer satisfaction. Continuous feedback and the improvement actions are thus applied to the iterations and sprints in the scrum framework, which makes the product or software defect-free.
- Daily stand-up meetings are arranged between the stakeholders and the project delivering team to ensure that everybody is on the same planet and there is no ambiguity among the team members related to the project. These scrum meetings help to keep track of the project/product improvement and improve the transparency among the scrum team members.
- Face-to-face and daily stand-up meetings are encouraged for efficient and effective work and to keep the team motivated continuously. Face-2-face communication is the most effective way of interacting with the team members and the mode of conveying information.
- Sustainable development is encouraged by using the scrum agile methodology steps as the developers, testers, customers and the stakeholders are on the same pace and same ground of project execution. Sustainable development through scrum agile deployment promotes forecasting of the activities.
- Agility is promoted and enhanced by paying attention to the product design and technical excellence in every iteration, which also minimizes the flaws and errors and gives the best product.
- Minimum cost and minimal error are the goals. The essential element of following the agile methodology step is the simplicity and the reduction of the same work and product backlog.
- Team anticipation is facilitated through the best architectures, requirements, and designs from self-organizing teams.
- Continuous feedback and suggestions are collected from the users or the customers, and the development team is free to take corrective actions for the product improvement. Continuous learning is promoted through a continuous experiment in each iteration.
- Inculcates motivation among team members and work-friendly environment so that the client’s expectation is met. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project, so team anticipation is promoted and supported in scrum agile methodology. Scrum agile principles enable project development around motivated professionals. It promotes the virtue of self-organization among the scrum team members who tend to manage themselves and the work eliminating the tedious task of micromanagement.
- Open communication, team meetings, and meetings with the stakeholders on a daily or regular basis to track the product progress.
- Scrum principle promotes value-based prioritization of the features and tasks in the individual sprint, which helps to add business value to the organization.
- Time-boxing is an important scrum principle as it effectively describes and removes the most important limiting restriction in Scrum, which is time. Time-boxed elements in Scrum consist of a number of sprints, daily stand-up meetings, Sprint Planning Meetings, review and retrospection meetings. The time box is fixed but can be molded as per the requirement of the project. Incorporating Scrum principles is an easy and complex process.
Scrum methodology is driven by the above-mentioned scrum values, and the scrum master is the driver. It is the duty of the scrum master to incorporate these scrum values within the scrum team to achieve scrum success. The scrum master must interact with the team and the product owner to ensure that the sprint backlog is created and utilized efficiently. Thus by incorporating the scrum values, an environment for learning through experimentation is created. The scrum focuses on a few objectives and integrated success rather than the big bulky objective.
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