Understanding scrum benefits and framework

Understanding Scrum in Five Minutes: Benefits and Framework

By Erik Hansen

Photo: Smith Tower, Pioneer Square, Seattle by Erik Hansen

The Benefits of Implementing Scrum Methodology Scrum is a style of agile project management. It is known to drastically improve a team’s quality, visibility, and speed of delivery. Scrum provides a scalable, product-agnostic framework that enables: • a quick completion of assignments.

• a transparent analysis of what made their completion successful.

• an iterative approach to introduce process improvements.

Using Scrum gives a clear vision of what to do and provides the data backing up a team’s decisions.

Scrum does this by using a physical or digital Kanban board, which empowers teams to: •

efficiently prioritize their projects and to-do items according to business and stakeholder needs.

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clarify ownership and accountability for all to-do items.

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have visibility into each other’s activities so they can better help one another.

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accurately track tasks and deadlines in one place.

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easily provide updates and reports to all stakeholders.

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forecast their future capabilities based on their past work.

An Overview of the Scrum Framework Scrum teams are small: between three and nine people.

Their work is structured around a recurring series of meetings held during a repeating, fixed-length sprint cycle that‘s commonly one-week long.

There are five types of Scrum meetings: •

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Backlog refinement This meeting is where the team refines their to-do list of everything they want and need done to meet their big goals.

Sprint planning In this session the team figures out what they can accomplish for their next sprint by pulling items from their backlog.

Daily Scrum Held at the same time each day, the Scrum meeting is a brief check-in by the team that’s no more than 15 minutes long.

Sprint review During this showcase the team demonstrates to their stakeholders what they finished during the sprint.

Sprint retrospective This is where the team looks at how they can immediately improve their process for the next sprint.

The flow of a sprint-cycle’s meetings: Backlog refinement Sprint retrospective

Sprint review

Sprint planning

Daily Scrum