Intro to Scrum in Under 10 Minutes

Summary

Hamid Shojaee's video script introduces Scrum as an agile development method, emphasizing its efficiency and practicality. Key concepts like product backlogs, user stories, team roles including the Scrum Master and Product Owner, sprints, and burndown charts are covered. The script outlines the Scrum process from planning to execution, highlighting tools like burndown charts for project visibility and daily Scrum meetings for team synchronization. The video concludes with a pitch for the OnTime tool, developed by the speaker, designed to facilitate Scrum implementation.

Takeaways

• 🔹 Scrum is an agile development practice that focuses on iterative progress and collaboration.
• 📝 Product backlogs are collections of user stories representing desired features from various stakeholders.
• 👤 Key roles in Scrum include the Product Owner, who represents users and sets product direction, and the Scrum Master, who facilitates the process.
• 👥 The development team includes various members responsible for building, testing, and using the product.
• 📈 Release planning involves selecting user stories for a release and estimating the work involved.
• 📊 Burndown charts are essential tools for visualizing project progress and ensuring smooth development.
• 🔢 Estimations can be made in story points or hours, with a standardized approach to ensure consistency.
• 🏃 Sprints are short, fixed-length periods where a subset of the release backlog is developed to a ship-ready state.
• 📅 The goal of each sprint is to complete all planned features, with a burndown chart tracking progress towards this goal.
• 🤝 Daily Scrum meetings facilitate communication, ensuring the team is aligned and addressing any obstacles promptly.
• 🔄 Sprint Retrospectives are held at the end of each sprint to reflect on successes and areas for improvement.

Q & A

What is Scrum and why is it considered a great agile development practice?

Scrum is an agile development framework that emphasizes incremental and iterative work towards completing a project. It is considered great because it promotes flexibility, transparency, and efficiency in software development processes.

What are the core Scrum concepts covered in the video?

The core Scrum concepts covered include product backlogs, team roles, sprints, burndown charts, and daily Scrum meetings.

What is a product backlog in Scrum?

A product backlog is a list of features, or user stories, that represent all the things that could make the product better. It acts as a wish list for the product.

What is the role of the product owner in Scrum?

The product owner represents the users and customers, ensuring the right features make it into the product backlog and setting the direction of the product.

What is the role of the Scrum Master?

The Scrum Master ensures the project progresses smoothly and that every team member has the tools they need to complete their work. They facilitate meetings and release planning.

How are user stories prioritized and estimated in Scrum?

User stories are prioritized based on their importance and estimated in terms of the amount of work involved. Larger stories may be broken down into smaller chunks for easier estimation.

What is a sprint in Scrum and what is its purpose?

A sprint is a short-duration milestone where a team tackles a manageable chunk of the project to get it to a ship-ready state. The purpose of each sprint is to complete a subset of the release backlog.

Why is the burndown chart important in Scrum?

The burndown chart is important because it provides a daily measure of the remaining work in a sprint, helping the team to monitor progress and adjust the project schedule if needed.

What is Burndown Velocity and how is it calculated?

Burndown Velocity is the average rate of productivity for the team, calculated by the slope of the burndown chart, which shows the rate at which work is being completed each day.

What happens during a Daily Scrum meeting?

During a Daily Scrum meeting, team members quickly list the work they completed since the last meeting and any obstacles they are facing to ensure the team stays in sync and issues are addressed promptly.

What is the purpose of a Sprint Retrospective meeting?

The purpose of a Sprint Retrospective meeting is for the team to reflect on what went well and areas for improvement after each sprint, allowing for continuous improvement in the Scrum process.

What is the tool mentioned in the video for implementing Scrum?

The tool mentioned in the video for implementing Scrum is called OnTime, which helps manage products, backlogs, teams, releases, and sprints, and provides project visibility with burndown charts.

Outlines

00:00

🚀 Introduction to Scrum

Hamid Shojaee introduces himself and his experience with software development projects. He highlights Scrum as an effective agile development practice and sets the stage for a fast-paced video that aims to explain Scrum's benefits and how to implement it quickly. The video covers core Scrum concepts such as product backlogs, team roles, sprints, burndown charts, and more. Hamid uses a hypothetical product to explain how features are turned into user stories and compiled into a product backlog, which acts as a wish list for product improvements. He also introduces the Scrum team roles: the Product Owner who represents users and sets product direction, and the Scrum Master who facilitates the project's smooth progress, ensuring the team has the necessary tools and planning meetings.

05:02

📈 Scrum Planning and Estimation

The script explains the process of release planning in Scrum, starting with the product backlog and identifying user stories for a release to form the release backlog. The team then prioritizes these stories and estimates the work involved, sometimes breaking larger stories into smaller chunks. Estimates can be made in story points or hours, with a standardized approach to ensure consistency. The script emphasizes the importance of estimating work in hours and using a bucketing system to avoid fractional estimates. This process helps the team understand the total work required for a release and prepare for sprint planning, which involves dividing the release backlog into sprint backlogs and setting goals for each sprint to achieve a ship-ready state.

📊 The Power of Burndown Charts

This section delves into the concept of burndown charts, which are critical for Scrum's success and project visibility. Burndown charts provide a daily measure of the remaining work in a sprint or release, typically trending towards zero. They offer historical data to help teams assess their progress and calculate burndown velocity, which is the average rate of productivity. This velocity allows teams to estimate completion dates and compare them with the required pace to finish on time. The script stresses the importance of this empirical data for ensuring projects stay on track and for making adjustments when necessary.

🗣️ Communication and Retrospectives in Scrum

The script discusses the Daily Scrum, a short daily meeting where team members share their progress and discuss obstacles. This practice ensures the team stays synchronized and can address issues promptly. Additionally, the script covers the importance of Sprint Retrospective meetings at the end of each sprint. These meetings allow the team to reflect on successes and areas for improvement, aligning with Scrum's agile and flexible nature. The section also introduces a tool called 'OnTime' that helps manage Scrum practices, including backlogs, releases, sprints, and provides burndown charts for project visibility.

🛠️ Implementing Scrum and Conclusion

The final part of the script provides a quick review of Scrum concepts, emphasizing the use of a Product Backlog composed of User Stories, which are then divided into Release Backlogs and Sprint Backlogs. It reiterates the importance of Burndown Charts for monitoring sprint progress and Daily Scrum meetings for communication. The script concludes with a call to action, encouraging viewers to create teams, collaborate, and ship software on time. It also invites feedback from viewers and promotes the 'OnTime' tool as a resource for implementing Scrum effectively.

Keywords

💡Scrum

Scrum is an agile framework for managing and developing projects, particularly software development. It emphasizes iterative progress, where work is completed in small increments called sprints. In the video, Scrum is introduced as a highly effective agile development practice that enables teams to deliver products efficiently by breaking down work into manageable pieces and prioritizing them.

💡Product Backlog

The product backlog is a comprehensive list of all the features, enhancements, and fixes that a product needs, as seen from the end-user's perspective. In the script, it is likened to a wish list and is composed of user stories, which are features written from the user's point of view. It serves as the foundation for planning what will be developed in future sprints.

💡User Stories

User stories are brief descriptions of a feature told from the perspective of the end-user or customer of the system. They are a fundamental part of the product backlog and are used to guide the development of the system. In the video, user stories are mentioned as the way features are written in Scrum, focusing on the user's needs.

💡Product Owner

The product owner is a key role in Scrum, responsible for defining the product vision, maintaining the product backlog, and ensuring that the team understands the items in the backlog. They act as the voice of the customer and set the direction for the product. In the script, the product owner is described as someone who ensures the right features make it into the product backlog.

💡Scrum Master

The Scrum Master is another pivotal role in Scrum, whose job is to facilitate the Scrum process and help the team to work productively. They ensure that the Scrum process is understood and enacted correctly by the team. The script humorously describes the Scrum Master as akin to a project manager but with a more dynamic title, emphasizing their role in facilitating and smoothing the project's progress.

💡Sprints

A sprint is a time-boxed effort during which a Scrum team works to complete a set of tasks and deliver a potentially shippable increment of the product. Sprints are short, typically ranging from two weeks to one month, and are used to complete a subset of the release backlog. The video script explains that sprints are short-duration milestones aimed at making the product ship-ready.

💡Burndown Chart

A burndown chart is a graphical representation that shows a timeline of work left to do versus work completed. It is a key tool in Scrum for tracking progress and ensuring that the project is on schedule. The video highlights the burndown chart as a primary reason for Scrum's popularity, providing daily visibility into the work remaining in a sprint.

💡Release Planning

Release planning in Scrum involves deciding which user stories will be included in the next release of the product. It involves prioritization and estimation of the work required for each item. The script describes how the team starts with the product backlog to identify which user stories will be part of the release backlog, setting the stage for sprint planning.

💡Estimates

Estimates in Scrum refer to the team's predictions of how much effort is required to complete a user story or task. The video mentions different techniques for creating estimates, such as story points or hours, with a standardized approach to bucketing time estimates to simplify the process and improve consistency.

💡Daily Scrum

The daily Scrum is a short, daily meeting for the Scrum team to synchronize activities and create a plan for the next 24 hours. It's a key practice for ensuring that work is progressing and that any impediments are addressed quickly. The script emphasizes the importance of these fast-paced meetings in maintaining team synchronization and addressing issues promptly.

💡Sprint Retrospective

A sprint retrospective is a meeting held at the end of each sprint in which the Scrum team reviews the work done during the sprint and identifies improvements for the next sprint. It's a critical part of the Scrum process for continuous improvement. The video script mentions this as a time for the team to reflect on what went well and areas for improvement.

Highlights

Introduction to Scrum as an agile development practice

Core Scrum concepts to be covered: product backlogs, team roles, sprints, burndown charts

Explanation of user-stories as features written from the end-user perspective

The product backlog as a wish list of product features

The role of the product owner in representing users and customers

The Scrum Master's role in facilitating project progress and team tools provision

The team's roles in building and testing the product

Release Planning process starting with the product backlog

Prioritization and estimation of user-stories for a release

Breaking down larger user-stories into smaller chunks

Estimation techniques, including story points and standardized hours

Sprints as short-duration milestones for manageable project chunks

The goal of each sprint to achieve a ship-ready state for a subset of the release backlog

Importance of monitoring sprint progress with a Burndown Chart

Burndown Chart as a project visibility tool showing daily work remaining

Burndown Velocity as the average rate of productivity

The Daily Scrum for ensuring team synchronization and addressing issues

Sprint Retrospective meetings for team reflection and improvement

OnTime tool for managing products, backlogs, teams, releases, and sprints

Encouragement to create a great team, collaborate, and ship software on time

Transcripts

[Music]

Hi.

This is me.

My name is Hamid Shojaee, and I've been involved with a number of software development projects

over the years,

at a number of different companies, and I've come to recognize 'Scrum,'

as one of the best agile development practices in use today.

In this fast-paced video,

I want to show you why Scrum is so great, and how you can get started with Scrum in

under 10 minutes.

I'll cover all the core Scrum concepts,

like product backlogs, team roles, sprints, burndown charts, and more.

So get ready to be bombarded with information.

Lets say THIS is the product we want to build.

For this product, we get all kinds of feature requests from customers, executives, or even

other team members.

In Scrum, features are written from the perspective of the end-user,

therefore, features are known as user-stories.

The collection of all these user-stories is called the product backlog.

Another way to think of the product backlog

is to think of it as a wish list of all the things that would make this product great.

Once we have our wish list or the product backlog,

we need to start planning which specific user-stories

we're going to put into a particular release of our product.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Let's back up a bit.

To build this product,

we need to have one or more people in our team who are going to play a variety of roles.

First, we need her.

She plays the role of product owner,

and helps make sure the right features make it into the product backlog

representing the users and customers of the product.

She helps set the direction of the product.

Then, we need this guy.

He is the Scrum Master and his job is to make sure the project is progressing smoothly

and that every member of the team has the tools they need to get their job done.

He sets up meetings, monitors the work being done and facilitates release planning.

He's a lot like a project manager, but that's such a boring title.

So, we'll call him a Scrum Master [Karate yell] to imply he knows some Jui-Jitsu.

And the rest of the team has similar roles to other development processes.

These guys build the product,

while these guys test it to make sure it works right.

These guys use it, and hopefully pay for it.

And these guys, they generally get in the way, but it turns out you can't build many

products without them.

But lets get back to this: Release Planning.

To plan a release, the team starts with this, the product backlog,

and they identify the user-stories they want to put into this release.

These user-stories then become part of the release backlog.

The team then prioritizes the user-stories and estimates the amount of work involved

for each item.

Sometimes larger user-stories are broken down into smaller more manageable chunks.

The collection of all the estimates provides a rough idea

of the total amount of work involved to complete the entire release.

A quick side note about estimates.

There are a lot of techniques for creating good estimates.

Some prefer estimating in story points where estimates are made

relative to building a small component with a known level of difficulty.

Unfortunately, story points don’t answer the question of,

“When will my project ship?”

I have found that the best technique is to estimate work in hours,

but to use some standards in how estimates are done.

For example, things that take less than a day to complete

will be estimated as 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours or 8 hours.

Every item will fall into one of those buckets.

There will be no 3 hour estimates, for example.

A 3 hour item would fall into the 4 hour bucket.

Larger items will be estimated as 2 days, 3 days, 5 days, or 10 days.

Again, all estimates in between will fall into the next larger bucket.

Extremely large items are similarly estimated in months: 1, 2, 3 or 6 Months,

but the reality is that such items will need to be broken down substantially

before work actually begins.

We’ll come back to these estimates in just a minute.

But for now, lets go back to this:

The Release Backlog.

With a prioritized set of user-stories and the estimated amount of work at hand,

we are now ready to plan out several sprints to get the work done.

Sprints are short-duration milestones that allow teams to tackle a manageable chunk of

the project

and get it to a ship-ready state.

Sprints generally range from a couple of days to as much as 30 days in length,

depending on the product's release cycles.

The shorter the release cycles, the shorter each sprint should be.

And you'll want to have at least 2 to as many as a dozen sprints in a given release.

So, at this point, we can take our release backlog and split it up into several of these:

Sprint Backlogs.

One of the most important things to remember about sprints

is that the goal of each sprint is to get a subset of the release backlog to a ship-ready

state.

So, at the end of each sprint, you should have a fully tested product with all the features

of that sprint 100% complete.

Since sprints are a very short, but a realistic representation of part of the product,

a late finish of the sprint is a great indicator that the project is not on schedule and something

needs to be done.

Therefore, it's extremely important to monitor the progress of each sprint with THIS:

A Burndown Chart.

The burndown chart is the number one reason for Scrum's popularity,

and one of the best project visibility tools to ensure a project is progressing smoothly.

The burndown chart provides a day-by-day measure of the amount of work that remains in a given

sprint or release.

In this graph, you can see that the amount of work remaining bounces up and down from

day to day,

but is generally trending towards zero.

Because historical information is provided in the burndown chart,

it's easy to see if the team is on the right track.

Using the burndown chart, the team can quickly calculate this:

the slope of the graph, which is also called the Burndown Velocity.

This is the average rate of productivity for each day.

For example, a team's rate of productivity might be that on a typical day,

they finish approximately 50 hours of work.

Knowing that, it's possible to calculate an estimated completion date for the sprint

or even for the entire release, based on the amount of work remaining.

What's great about the burndown chart

is that we can compare our actual velocity and projected completion date

to what the team needs to do in order to finish OnTime.

This is perhaps the most useful piece of knowledge

that any team member, product owner or product executive can have about the project,

because knowing whether or not the project is on track early in the schedule

can help teams make the proper adjustments necessary to get the project on track.

The burndown chart provides empirical proof that the project is on track or if it's going

to be late.

So, let's talk a little about where the data for this incredibly useful burndown chart

comes from.

As you recall, part of the release planning process was to create an estimate for each

user-story in the release backlog.

The collection of these estimates for a given sprint represents the total amount of work

that must be done to complete that sprint.

As each team member goes through and makes progress on one or more of the user-stories,

they simply update the amount of time remaining for each of their own items.

So, the total amount of time remaining on the group of user-stories that make up a sprint,

changes on a day-by-day basis,

hopefully going downward until it hits zero when the sprint is complete.

The burndown chart aggregates the remaining work data and shows it visually.

It's brilliant because it communicates a massive amount of information in just a few seconds.

And that brings us to this:

The Daily Scrum.

The Daily Scrum is an essential tool to having communication flow freely between team members.

The idea is to have fast paced stand-up meetings

where team members quickly list the work they completed since the last meeting,

and any obstacles in their way.

By meeting daily, it ensures the team is always in-sync,

and any major issues are dealt with as soon as they are known.

Finally, as each sprint comes to a finish,

it’s important to have a Sprint Retrospective meeting,

where the team can reflect on what went right and areas of improvement.

After all, Scrum is a flexible agile development method

that needs constant improving and tweaking for every team.

So, there you have it.

Scrum in under 10 minutes.

You now know all the essential concepts to start implementing Scrum inside of your organization.

But wait a second,

what about tools to help you implement Scrum?

Well, it just so happens that I’ve spent the last 10 years building such a tool.

With a lot of help from these guys:

a group of genius coders and design ninjas.

The tool is called, OnTime,

and it helps you manage your products, your backlogs, your team,

your releases and your sprints.

It gives you project visibility with burndown charts,

and always answers the question of who is working on what.

You can get started with it for free, at Axosoft.com.

Of course, you could use a giant white board, some note cards [Paper crumples]

and a bunch of different spreadsheets [Paper crumples] to track everything.

You could also use an abacus instead of a calculator to do math, but we’re getting

a little off topic.

So, let's quickly review everything.

In Scrum, you work with this: a Product Backlog,

which is nothing more than a list of features that we call User-Stories.

You then break down the product backlog into one or more Release Backlogs,

and for a given release, you further break up the release backlog

into a number of Sprint Backlogs

which are essentially short duration milestones throughout your project.

You then monitor the progress of each sprint using these: Burndown Charts

and have Daily Scrum meetings to ensure everything is on track.

After each sprint, you have a Retrospective meeting to fine-tune everything.

And if you want a tool to implement Scrum, you can use, OnTime.

It'll help you ship software, OnTime.

That’s all there is to it!

Oh, and one last thing.

Whether you loved or hated this video, I’d love to hear from you.

You can reach me on twitter or via email if you have any feedback.

Now get going,

Create a great team,

Collaborate,

and Ship Software OnTime.

[Music with whistling fades]