Updated June 12, 2023
Introduction to Scrum Methodology
Scrum handles project management when the software is developed following an Agile-based approach. In another way, we can say it is a platform that provides a framework to manage a process or task. Scrum brings the team together, and everyone has a part to play in the development process. Scrum encourages the team to organize, learn from the experience, and continuously evaluate the work. Any impediment is recorded, and help can be obtained after discussing it with the team. If you observe if a team or organization is working on an agile-based approach, they will most likely be employing Scrum to handle their management activities. In this topic, we will learn about What Scrum methodology is.
Scrum has many things that strengthen the team, such as meetings, tools, and roles that can develop a concrete team structure and manage their work. The scrum-like framework will be quite helpful to the team as it provides continuous learning and a way to handle continuous fluctuations in project development easily. Scrum acknowledges that the team doesn’t know all the details or requirements at the start of the project, and it strongly believes that the team can learn with frequent meetings and communications about the project. Scrum helps the team adapt to any changes easily and will help in deciding the priority if there are multiple tasks to be handled after meeting with the deciding person. Most of them are either customers or users.
Importance of Scrum Methodology
Scrum methodology is quite popular among teams developing through the agile-based approach. The main importance of the scrum is that they address the impediments and complexities present in the tasks by making the information transparent. This makes people or team members inspect and introspect current conditions rather than stay on predicted conditions. This scrum methodology addresses the common pitfall of one of the most popular legacy methodologies: waterfall.
In the waterfall model, there will be chaos when there are any changes or if there are frequent change requests. Agile and a scrum managing framework can easily tackle this problem. Some other pitfalls addressed by the transparency of scrum include underestimating the time, resources, and budget and inaccurate reports submitted on the work progress. All these pitfalls ultimately will compromise the highly unacceptable software quality.
Ensuring transparency in standards of development in the scrum methodology will ensure that the delivered product meets the expectations without compromise. Scrum has frequent meetings, reviews, and inspections that ensure any deviation from the standard can be identified during the early phase and corrected. Scrum has sprint planning, sprint retrospective meetings, daily stand-ups, sprint review, etc., to handle all the inspections and impediments.
How to Use the Scrum Methodology?
The Scrum can be divided into four main categories, and they are –
- Scrum Team
- Scrum Events or Ceremonies
- Scrum Artifacts
- Scrum Rules
These four categories are the main pillars in the successful management of agile-based development; using scrum, let’s look at each of the
1. Scrum Team
The Scrum team includes the following members –
- The Product Owner: They are the products and key stakeholders. They are generally customers or the persons mediating with the customer.
- The Scrum Master: Scrum master is the host and acts as a facilitator to the team and product owner and makes sure the team communication and sprint meetings are handled efficiently
- The Team: The team involved in working on completing the task assigned during the sprint. The team members include developers as well as testers.
2. Scrum Events
Following are the scrum events –
- The Sprint: Sprint is time-based; the period during which the planned tasks are expected to be completed usually ranges from 2 to 4 weeks
- Sprint Planning: This a meeting held where the priority tasks are identified from the backlogs and assigned to the sprint to be completed depending on the strength of the resources
- Sprint Review: We review the completed tasks during this meeting and ask for any shortcomings to be addressed.
- Sprint Retrospective: This is the sprint final team meeting to discuss what went well in the sprint and what needs to be improved
3. Scrum Artifacts
The following comes under scrum artifacts –
- The product backlog: This is one of the important documents that outline all the requirements detail for the system. In a way, this is a to-do list of all the work items.
- The Sprint Backlog: The team needs to implement a specific list of items or tasks from the product backlog in the current sprint, known as the sprint backlog.
4. Scrum Rules
The team decides the rules, scrum master, product owner, and other stakeholders that will be best for the team and the process.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Scrum Methodology
Following are the advantages and disadvantages mentioned:
Advantages
- People have seen the scrum-based methodology offer high productivity.
- High-Quality outcomes.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction.
- Better team communication and dynamics.
- Reduced time for releases and better cost savings.
Disadvantages
- The experience level of resources and other scrum team members matters and may impact the outcome.
- The team must prioritize commitment and support, or the lack of learning may impact the product.
- Frequent meetings may affect morale, so we need better engaging meetings.
Conclusion
Thus, due to the benefits of scrum methodology, most agile operating teams, and organizations have adopted this. Thus, scrum helps better management, provides high-quality and reliable products, and imparts learning to the team.
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