Lesson 07: A quick overview of Scrum

We’re going to have a quick overview of Scrum in this lesson before going into details.

2020 update notes

A few things have changed in the latest version of the Scrum Guide (2020), and the ASF exam is updated based on those changes. However, our videos are not updated yet; so, please note the following changes:

There’s no “development team” anymore, but only Developers.
The recommended team size is now “10 people or less” for the whole Scrum Team.
It’s now called “self-managing” instead of “self-organizing” (same concept, different name).
There’s a Product Goal now, which is part of the Product Backlog, and sets the overall direction for the product.
The Sprint Goal is now considered as part of the Sprint Backlog.
The concept of commitments is introduced for the artifacts:
- Product Goal is the commitment for the Product Backlog.
- Sprint Goal is the commitment for the Sprint Backlog.
- Definition of Done is the commitment for the Increment.
The Definition of Done is created by the whole Scrum Team now, and not only by the Developers.
Now, any time you finish an item (based on the Definition of Done), a new Increment is formed. It’s not about having just one Increment at the end of the Sprint.
The guide doesn’t suggest 10% as the ceiling for the amount of time Developers spend on Product Backlog refinement.
Sprint Planning has three topics now:
- Why? -> Sprint Goal
- What? -> Items from the Product Backlog
- How? -> Tasks created by decomposing the items
“Estimating” is now called “sizing”. So, it’s the responsibility of the Developers to size the Product Backlog items.
“Value” is no longer one of the mandatory attributes of the Product Backlog items. The mandatory attributes are description, size, and order.
Instead of calling the Increments “potentially releasable”, the new guide calls them “usable” (more or less the same concept).

00:05 – Welcome back.
00:09 – We are done with the first section of this course, which was about the concept of Agility.
00:15 – We compared the Predictive systems with Adaptive systems, and one important message there is that it’s not about right and wrong.
00:24 – They are two different things, both of them work, and each of them is more appropriate to certain types of projects.
00:32 – Our focus is obviously on the Adaptive systems, the Agile ones, and we also reviewed some of the practical consequences of using Adaptive systems.
00:44 – For example, the different types of planning that we have in Adaptive systems, or the way we create the product, or the way that people, the business people, have to collaborate with the technical people and so on.
00:58 – But still, everything that we had before in the previous section was a little bit abstract, wasn’t it?
01:06 – Now we have to make it more practical, and that’s done by reviewing methodologies and frameworks.
01:15 – The most famous framework is Scrum.
01:20 – There are different ways of working in an Agile way, and you need to know what types of people have to be involved, what type of documents they have to create, artifacts, what type of meetings they need to have, that’s what we mean when we talk about a methodology or a framework, and it’s important for Scrum to be called a framework and not a methodology because the overall idea is that a methodology is something really huge and when you want to use it, you usually have to remove some …
01:56 – some of the things that are not applicable to your project, but a framework here in this context is the bare minimums that you need to have in your project.
02:08 – So, you don’t remove anything, you just add more techniques and practices to that.
02:15 – What else can I tell you? Okay, it’s also important to note that Scrum is not the only way of being Agile, even though whenever people are talking about Agile, they’re practically talking about Scrum because that’s the most famous one, and the only thing that people really know.
02:32 – Also, there are many new ways of Agile systems, new methodologies, and most of them use Scrum as their fundamental core thing and then add other things.
02:49 – For example, LeSS and SAFe and Nexus and other things.
02:52 – They’re all about scaling it up, and there are also some other things that are highly influenced by Scrum or uses parts of Scrum; the Kanban development, for example, but that’s okay.
03:09 – We will talk about these things more in the rest of the course.
03:12 – Now, in this lesson, we’re going to have a really quick overview of Scrum.
03:17 – I want you to know what Scrum is about before we go deeper into different details that we have, okay?
03:24 – Alright. This is Scrum.
03:28 – We have a number of Sprints. Sprint is the term we use in Scrum to refer to those partitions of time.
03:37 – If you remember, previously I used to call them Iterations.
03:42 – Iteration is a little bit more generic, but not 100% generic.
03:48 – Iteration is practically the term used in XP, which is an alternative to Scrum.
03:58 – Also, it is called Timebox in DSDM, and you remember that Sprints or Iterations are timeboxed and here we are using the word Timebox as a concept, which means that we don’t extend the duration of that.
04:14 – They are all timeboxed, but in DSDM, we also call it a Timebox. That’s fine.
04:20 – So, here that’s the concept of a Sprint, and Sprints are maximum 1 month.
04:27 – You set the duration of the Sprint and normally they all have the same duration.
04:33 – For example, you decide to have 2-week Sprints in your project. Each iteration will be 2 weeks.
04:39 – We have that Product Backlog. The Product Backlog is a list of all features that you have in mind for the future.
04:51 – Whenever you think about a new feature, a new requirement, a new idea, anything, you will put it in the Product Backlog.
04:59 – You don’t want to forget about that. It’s very simple.
05:02 – It can be a whiteboard, for example, and you can put sticky notes or index cards on that whiteboard.
05:09 – That will be your Product Backlog, and then in the beginning of each Sprint, we will pick a number of items from the Product Backlog and we will put them in the Sprint Backlog, and then we will know that that’s what we’re going to do in that Sprint.
05:27 – That makes it simpler.
05:31 – Instead of looking at a big Product Backlog, you will have a small list and that’s our plan for the Sprint.
05:40 – So, we work and at the end of each Sprint, we will have a piece of working software.
05:47 – We will show it to the customer, we receive feedback, and where is that feedback reflected in this system?
05:55 – The ideas that are generated. The changes that they may want.
06:00 – Those will be reflected in the Product Backlog, and then we will use the Product Backlog for the next Sprints.
06:08 – And I didn’t talk to you a lot about that, but another basic thing that we have in Agile is that we can decide on which features to develop for each iteration, right?
06:25 – So, it’s a good idea to focus on the most important ones, right? That’s obvious.
06:31 – So, what happens here is that the Product Backlog is always ordered based on importance, if you will.
06:38 – We will talk about what it means to be important for something, and for each Sprint, we will pick the items from the top of the Product Backlog, which are the most important items.
06:50 – Okay, we’ll talk about all of them more in detail in the next lessons.
06:54 – Let’s zoom in to one of the Sprints here.
06:57 – This is what we have inside each Sprint. The first thing that we have is the Sprint Planning.
07:03 – That’s a short meeting for the team members to get together and decide on what they want to have in the Sprint Backlog.
07:12 – They create the Sprint Backlog and some other things.
07:16 – Then they work during the Sprint, for example 2 or 3 weeks, whatever the timebox is for the Sprint, and at the end, we have two meetings. One is the Sprint Review.
07:29 – That’s where you show the product, the complete product. It has to be usable.
07:36 – In Scrum, it’s called potentially releasable. I don’t really see why.
07:42 – You could just say releasable, but potentially releasable, just maybe to insist more on the fact we don’t have to release them, but it has to have the capability to be released if we want to, and that’s important because when it’s like that, then we can show it to the users.
08:02 – The users can really feel what … how it’s going to work. Otherwise, if things are not complete, then the feedback that you will get will not be reliable, won’t be useful.
08:13 – So, you will show that to the customer and end-users, you will receive feedback, which will be reflected in the Product Backlog and will affect the next Sprint, and after we are done with that, do you remember one of the principles that we had, those 12 principles, generic Agile principles? One of them was about reflecting on the past and see how we can improve, right?
08:40 – That’s all about that last meeting, the Sprint Retrospective.
08:45 – That’s another short meeting where team members get together, talk about the way they worked in the previous Sprint, and see how they can be a better team for the next Sprint. Very good practice.
09:00 – So, that’s it. Then, we repeat the same Sprint over and over again until we’re done with everything in the Product Backlog or we see that we have all the important features in the software and it’s best if we move on to the next project.
09:18 – And finally, this is the team.
09:23 – We have three types of roles.
09:25 – The first one is the Product Owner.
09:28 – That’s a business-oriented person, only one person, and they are responsible for the Product Backlog and responsible for communicating the features with the customer and so on.
09:41 – Then we have the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is someone who is expert in Scrum and helps everyone else in the team understand how they can work.
09:52 – If they have any questions about Scrum or techniques required for Scrum, then they will go to the Scrum Master.
10:00 – Also, the Scrum Master is responsible for removing impediments when you have a problem.
10:08 – For example, one of the senior managers is distracting you.
10:13 – You can go to the Scrum Master and then they know how to handle things.
10:17 – And finally, we have the Development Team.
10:20 – A number of developers who do everything required to create the product, and there are 3 to 9 developers in Scrum. What if we need more?
10:29 – We’ll talk about that later.
10:32 – Okay. That was a quick overview.
10:35 – In the next few lessons, we will talk about the people in the team, and then we will move on to the events that we have, the Sprint Planning and so on, and finally we will talk about the Artifacts.

Next, we’re going to talk about the roles in Scrum.

Lesson 07: A quick overview of Scrum

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