Scrum Handbook PDF: Everything you need to know to start a Scrum project in your organization
Scrum is an agile method designed to add energy, focus, clarity, and transparency to project planning and implementation. Today, Scrum is used in small, mid-sized, and large software corporations all over the world.
Properly implemented, Scrum will be:
- • Increase speed of development
- Align individual and corporate objectives
- Create a culture driven by performance
- Support shareholder value creation
- Achieve stable and consistent communication of performance at all levels
- Enhance individual development and quality of life
This manual gives some basic information on how to get started with Scrum and also describes some cases in point. It is based on The Scrum Papers.
Agile Development and Scrum
Scrum is, as the reader supposedly knows, an agile method. The agile family of development methods evolved from the old and well-known iterative and incremental life-cycle approaches. They were born out of a belief that an approach more grounded in human reality – and the product development reality of learning, innovation, and change – would yield better results.
Agile principles emphasize building working software that people can get hands on quickly, versus spending a lot of time writing specifications up front. Agile development focuses on crossfunctional teams empowered to make decisions, versus big hierarchies and compartmentalization by function. It also focuses on rapid iteration, with continuous customer input along the way. Often when people learn about agile development or Scrum, there’s a glimmer of recognition – it sounds a lot like back in the start-up days “when we just did it.â€
Scrum was strongly influenced by a 1986 Harvard Business Review article on the practices associated with successful product development groups; in this paper the term “Scrum†was introduced, relating successful development to the game of Rugby in which a self-organizing (self-managing) team moves together down the field of product development. The first Scrum team was created at Easel Corporation in 1993 by Dr. Jeff Sutherland (the author of this manual) and the Scrum framework was formalized in 1995 by Ken Schwaber.
Used Scrum at major companies
Today, scrum is used by companies large and small, including:
- Yahoo!
- Microsoft
- Lockheed Martin
- Johns Hopkins APL
- Siemens
- Nokia
- Motorola, SAP
- Cisco
- GE
- CapitalOne
- US Federal Reserve
Teams using Scrum report significant improvements, and in some cases complete transformations, in both productivity and morale. For product developers – many of whom have been burned by the “management fad of the month club†– this is significant. Or to put it plain: Scrum is just simple and powerful!
This is How Scrum Works
1- The Product Backlog
A Scrum project is driven by a product vision compiled by the Product Owner and expressed in the Product Backlog. The Product Backlog is a prioritized list of what’s required, ranked in order of value to the customer or business, with the highest-value items at the top of the list. The Product Backlog evolves over the lifetime of the project, and items are continuously added, removed or reprioritized.
2- The Sprint
Scrum structures product development in cycles of work called Sprints, iterations of work that are typically 1–4 weeks in length. The Sprints are of fixed duration and end on a specific date whether the work has been completed or not; they are never extended.
3- Sprint Planning
At the beginning of each Sprint, the Sprint Planning Meeting takes place. The Product Owner and Scrum Team (with facilitation from the ScrumMaster) review the Product Backlog, discuss the goals and context for the items, and the Scrum Team selects the items from the Product Backlog to commit to complete by the end of the Sprint, starting at the top of the Product Backlog. Each item selected from the Product Backlog is designed and then broken down into a set of individual tasks. The list of tasks is recorded in a document called the Sprint Backlog.
4- Daily Scrum Meeting
Once the Sprint has started, the Scrum Team engages in another of the key Scrum practices: The Daily Stand-Up Meeting. This is a short (15 minutes) meeting that happens every workday at an appointed time. Everyone on the team attends. At this meeting, the information needed to inspect progress is presented. This information may result in replanning and further discussions immediately after the Daily Scrum.
5- Sprint Review and Retrospective
After the Sprint ends, there is the Sprint Review, where the Scrum Team and stakeholders inspect what was done during the Sprint, discuss it, and figure out what to do next. Present at this meeting is the Product Owner, Team Members, and ScrumMaster, plus customers, stakeholders, experts, executives, and anyone else interested.
Following the Sprint Review, the team gets together for the Sprint Retrospective which is an opportunity for the team to discuss what’s working and what’s not working, and agree on changes to try.
The Scrum Team is comprised of three Scrum Roles
A. The Product Owner
Takes the inputs of what the product should be and translates them into a product vision or a Product Backlog.
B. The Team Develops
the product envisioned by the Product Owner.
C. The Scrum Master
Does whatever it takes to make the Scrum Team successful, such as removing organizational impediments, facilitating meetings, and acting as a gatekeeper so no one unnecessarily interrupts the team’s work.
Agile Scrum Full Course In 4 Hours
In this Scrum Full Course video, we’ll teach you everything you need to know about Agile and Scrum. We’ll be covering topics like Scrum, Agile, Agile Project Management, Agile User Stories, Scaled Agile Framework, how Scrum, Kanban, and Agile are different from one another, and much more! So, without further ado, let’s jump right in!
What you will learn?
- What is Agile?
- What is Scrum?
- Agile Scrum Master
- Agile Project Management
- Agile User Stories
- What is Scaled Agile Framework?
- Agile vs Waterfall
- Scrum vs Agile
- Scrum vs Kanban
- How to Become a Certified Scrum Master
