Scrum

Scrum organises work into sprints of one to four weeks. At the end of each one there should be something finished and potentially shippable. The idea is a frequent, fixed inspection point.

Roles

• Product Owner: decides what gets done and in what order. One person, not a committee, with real authority over priority.
• Scrum Master: makes sure the process works and removes obstacles. Not a project manager, does not assign tasks.
• Development team: the people who build. They organise themselves to meet the sprint goal.

Events

1. Planning: the team picks how much work goes into the sprint and defines the goal.
2. Daily: fifteen minutes to sync and surface blockers. Not a status report for the manager.
3. Review: finished work is shown to the relevant people and feedback is gathered.
4. Retrospective: the team looks at how it worked and picks one or two concrete improvements for the next sprint.

Artifacts

The product backlog is the prioritised list of everything pending, live and owned by the Product Owner. The sprint backlog is what the team has committed to for the current sprint. The increment is the sum of everything finished to date, in a shippable state.

Common antipatterns

• Sprints ending with "almost done" work that carries over: the definition of done is not real.
• The daily turned into a report to a manager: it stops being useful for coordination.
• A Product Owner with no authority who has to check every priority: the bottleneck moves outside the team.
• Retrospectives that change nothing: if nobody acts on the improvements, the team stops proposing them.
• Estimating to measure productivity: estimates inflate and lose their purpose.