Scrum For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4

The Talent and the Timing

IN THIS CHAPTER

Enabling developers

Excelling at backlog estimation

Defining done

Benefiting from estimation techniques

Talent wins games. But teamwork and intelligence wins championships.

— MICHAEL JORDAN

Developers sit at the core of scrum. The primary focus of the product owner and the scrum master revolves around making sure that the environment is as ideal as possible for the developers to reach maximum productivity. This chapter reveals how developers self-organize and make their best contributions to the scrum team. To simplify this accountability, the word developer is used throughout this book. Developer refers to anyone with the technical skills and expertise to do the work. Consequently (and similarly), development is a developer’s work to create a working product increment or outcome.

After you have your scrum team, product goal, and product roadmap in place, the next step is to estimate the amount of work for each requirement. The developers begin by estimating the effort involved in high-level requirements. Here, you create a starting ...