Learning Agile

Chapter 4. Scrum and Self-Organizing Teams

Grand principles that generate no action are mere vapor. Conversely, specific practices in the absence of guiding principles are often inappropriately used.

Jim Highsmith¹

The board game Othello has the slogan, “A minute to learn, a lifetime to master.” This applies really well to a team that’s learning Scrum. The basic practices and mechanics of Scrum are straightforward, and not difficult to adopt. But understanding how Scrum’s values can make those practices and mechanics result in better software can be more challenging.

The rules of Scrum are simple and easy to communicate, which makes it a great starting point for many teams adopting Agile. Here’s the basic pattern for a Scrum project:

• There are three main roles on a Scrum project: Product Owner, Scrum Master, and team member. (We capitalize “Product Owner” and “Scrum Master” when talking about the Scrum roles.)

• The Product Owner works with the rest of the team to maintain and prioritize a product backlog of features and requirements that need to be built.

• The software is built using timeboxed iterations called sprints. At the start of each sprint, the team does sprint planning  to determine which features from the backlog they will build. This is called the sprint backlog, and the team works throughout the sprint to build all of the features in it.

• Every day, the team holds a short face-to-face meeting called the Daily Scrum to update each other on the progress they’ve ...