Scrum Methodology

The backbone of agile methodology is the fragmentation of a complex task into a small components. As a result those development of small components leads to iterations. So a typical project of 6 months is replaced with 12 iterations of two week projects. So we finish one iteration to measure what tasks we achieved.

Now agile is a Software Development methodology with many methods and set of good practices, Scrum is one of such agile methods. In scrum, we generally have Sprints which is the name given to the iterations.  A sprint could be of 1 week to 4 week long. One thing which I forgot to mention is that the success of project execution using agile methodology largely depends on the team. Few words which would be typically used to describe those teams are cross functional, self organized. It’s a very much disciplined team. The team should not have a typical PM who decides who has to do what, rather this call is taken by the whole team. BA’s and scrum master though play a significant role. In my point of view BA’s are the people who has the potential (in terms of project scope and feature control) to bring down a project and vice-versa. Scrum master is the one who typically manages the iterations, plays a role of coach for the team and should encourage and empower team to deliver the best.

In Scrum, we typically showcase the project or “progress” to the client and consistently take their feedbacks, suggestions, improvements. This is where we accommodate the “change”. We build a component and do a showcase to the client (in other words demo), this gives us the advantage of changing it as the rest is yet to be developed. This also help us understand the customers when they give their feedback. Moreover it increases the customer’s confidence in the development team.

So a typical scrum project will have activities like Sprint planning meeting, daily scrum meeting, sprint review and finally Sprint Retrospective.

Reading this article may land you with several questions in mind but when practised properly it will lead to a more organized team delivering a good product.