How to determine whether the team actually implements scrum-question 20 of the scrum method (I) scrum users strongly recommend

As one of the agile methods, scrum was developed by Ken schwaber and Jeff more than a decade ago.
Sutherland proposed jointly that the name came from rugby and That Scrum was used to compare the speed and flexibility presented by the software team in software development. (In the rules of a rugby match, scrum aims to allow a rapid, secure, and fair start after a minor violation or suspension. When the team is on the ground and advances in the overall formation, every player always maintains a global judgment on the field. rugby players pass each other and strive to win .)

Scrum is an empirical method based on the process control theory and advocates self-organizing teams. The core of its runtime framework is iterative incremental parallel development, which is also an adaptive software development method. Scrum provides a highly visual practical framework or agile process for managing software development complexity management. It can be used to package existing software engineering practices and improve software productivity, improve communication and cooperation methods, enable people to collaborate and focus on business goals. Currently, scrum has been used by many software enterprises, including some well-known enterprises, such as Microsoft
, IBM, Google, and Nokia.

As a scrum coach, I am often asked questions about scrum implementation and agile development. The following is a summary for readers who are interested in and have doubts about this method.

Q: What are the core features of scrum?

A: A Multi-functional and self-organizing team based on function development; a highly flexible adaptive visual agile project management framework; and a 30-day box iteration that supports incremental parallel development.

Q: Which projects can use scrum?

A: Originally, scrum was used to develop complex business application products with unpredictable requirements. However, after more than 10 years of development, it has been applied to software in all fields, scrum can be used from the software of life-related to more casual software. When using scrum, you don't need to discuss what the artifacts are and how many they are, but how rigorous they are. As a guiding principle, it is up to the entire scrum team to determine the degree of normality and minimize it. Of course, this requires a wealth of practical experience to judge.

Question 3: must the scrum team be 7 people?
A: There are three basic roles in scrum: product owner product.
Owner and development team development
Team and scrummaster. Scrum teams usually have 5 to 5 ~ 9 members. A typical scrum team should have 7 members. However, a project can be completed by multiple teams, that is, using Scrum
Scrums practice rules to expand the project team scale: Each scrum team also has a representative, usually a scrum master, involved in Scrum
Scrums meetings coordinate the work of multiple scrum teams, which are similar to daily scrum meeting but are held once a week.

Q: It seems that SCRUM is very simple. Can you give us a simpler summary?

A: Yes. Scrum looks very simple. You can summarize scrum very easily:

The team and project contributor create a list of all the tasks that the team needs to do. This can be a list of tasks or features. This is the product backlog.

Every month, teams strive to achieve the top tasks in the list. This part is the work they estimate will take a month to complete. They expand it into a detailed task list called Sprint
Backlog. The team promises to present or deliver the results to the investors at the end of the month.

Every day, the team starts face to face 5 ~ Every 10 minutes, they will update their respective States and eliminate the obstacles that slow them down. This is called daily stand-up meeting.

Designate a special person to act as the scrum master. The task of this person is to exclude or arrange for others to exclude any obstacle mentioned by the team at regular meetings.

However, its practice is not simple and requires key self-adaptation and adherence to the core scrum values-commitment, focus, openness, respect and courage.

Q: We believe that we stick to a certain degree of scrum
The meeting mode is necessary, but it may be difficult to execute for a while. Some people may even feel "disgusting". What do you think of this?

Answer 5: hold the meeting every day ~ Scrum in about 20 minutes
Meeting is at the heart of scrum and projects. If this problem occurs, I guess the software team tends to interpret scrum under the existing project management method, we did not fully understand the fundamental principles of self-management, emergence mechanisms, visibility, and evaluation/adaptation cycles.

Implementation of scrum practices according to the "defined" reference framework, ignoring the shift from control to authorization, from command to collaboration, the scrum master is likely to "from the last scrum
What did I do one day after the meeting ?" It is understood as "checking whether a team member has completed the task assigned by him in the previous scrum meeting" and "from now to the next scrum
What will I do on a meeting day "is interpreted as" telling the team members from now till the next scrum
What Should meeting do in a day "," what are the obstacles encountered at work "is understood as" he will review whether the team can accomplish the goal ". The team members put scrum
Meeting refers to meetings that report work conditions in sequence.

Adhering to the following seven basic principles will facilitate the effective implementation of scrum meeting:

1. The Team believes in self-management and supports self-management.

2. They serve as teams to jointly commit to the sprint goal.

3. They recognize the importance of communication and promote communication through daily scrum meeting.

4. They understand and embrace the necessary daily task changes throughout the sprint cycle, the rules of mutually dependent meetings, and the daily meetings allow team members to manage and respond to changes.

5. The Team has an effective scrum master or a leader authorized to make decisions and be held accountable.

6. The Team believes that work visualization is very important, and the relationship between the team and other teams is improved transparently to gain a higher level of trust and collaboration.

7. The team associates the daily scrum meeting Review with other milestones to make the meeting as effective as possible.

6. Q: What can be used to determine whether the software team is actually implementing scrum?
A: To answer this question, Jeff, founder of scrum
Sutherland uses the eight conditions tested by Nokia to determine whether scrum is being executed. The eight conditions are as follows:

1
Do you have a fixed iteration cycle? Does your iteration cycle start at a specific time and end at a fixed time, And the iteration cycle must be less than 6 weeks? (If the answer is no, it does not conform to the iterative development principle)

2. Can you provide software that can work at the end of each iteration cycle? (If the answer is no, it does not conform to the iterative development principle)

3. Do you need a complete and detailed Requirement Description before the iteration starts? (If yes, it does not conform to the iterative development principle)

4. Do you want to use testing as part of iterative incremental development during development? (If the answer is no, it does not conform to the iterative development principle)

Next, we will use four additional scrum rules to determine whether scrum is implemented:

1. Do you have any product owners? Can someone work with you on behalf of the customer?

2
If there is a product owner, can they provide the product backlog to be developed? Does the backlog of this product be sorted by priority? Have you estimated the time required to develop these features?

3. Does the team use the burndown graph during the development process to show workload changes, track the progress, and calculate the team's development speed?

4. Can I ensure that the project manager does not interfere with the Team's work during the iteration process?

Through the above eight points, we can basically determine whether the team has actually implemented scrum.

Q: How can I measure team performance in scrum?

A: You can use speed to measure the team's performance, that is, the ability to transform requirements into software functions in a sprint. It can be the number of product backlogs completed in a sprint.
Item (including functional and non-functional requirements and other topics), or into a suitable unit Currency such as 10000 of the total number of product backlog items completed.

Q: How can I measure my individual performance in scrum?

A: You can only measure the performance of the entire scrum team. Scrum is a self-managed team, not a group of individuals. Of course, this may be a tough issue for your software organization, and I don't have a good solution. For software organizations, I suggest you focus your attention on the software you produce, the real development features, and the ability of software organizations to improve benchmarks and market value. At the project level, I suggest you simplify the complete personal check process into three questions: how can you help increase the value of your organization? What have you done to make the customer happy? What do your colleagues think of you? You can ask your colleagues to evaluate your personal contribution and List 1 ~ 10. In daily
On scrum meeting, you can see who contributes and who does not.

Q: How can I modify a defect during the sprint?

A: One of the goals of the scrum team is to fix the defects in the sprint. They are able to achieve this goal after they are gradually proficient in adopting a 30-day iteration cycle, especially through the use of automated testing. When a scrumt team member makes an estimate of a coding task, this estimate contains the time for fixing the defects found during the implementation process, otherwise, you should determine and estimate an independent task ("fixing defects") as the product.
Backlog item processing. I prefer to determine only one task, but it is not considered completed before it passes all tests.

The defects found later (or that are not fixed in the iterations) should be treated in the same way as the product backlog. According to
The same method as the backlog is used to determine the priority of defect repair and distribute it to a subsequent iteration. As long as the scope of an iteration is exceeded, there is no defect concept. Fixing a defect and adding a feature is just one thing. In addition, if the existing team still needs to maintain the existing product, it should remind the software team to take a special time to handle the defect modification task that needs to be responded immediately during planning.

Q: What are the limitations of scrum and what should I pay attention to during implementation?

A: We all know that SCRUM is only a practical framework for agile management. Every method has its own boundaries and limitations, one popular saying in the industry is "no silver bullet ". Scrum defines only a high-level, easy-to-use, and very small set of practices for software development management. Scrum does not mean how the software team should develop software. It insists that: people should be like mature adults in their work and in dealing with problems. Therefore, it does not involve specific software development technologies and personnel communication, expected management, problem conflicts, and other management skills, these need to be supplemented by other related theories and skills. In addition, like other projects, the software team needs the expertise in its business field to ensure the success of the software project.

Scrum originated from the software field in the United States. The implementation of self-Organizational Management in China emphasizes that self-organizational management should break away from the organizational environment that may be accustomed to listening and act, and establish self-discipline, self-organization and implementation of work management methods and organizational environments, at the same time, the scientific principles behind scrum can be adjusted according to specific circumstances. We recommend that you follow the practice framework provided by scrum at the beginning, and then adjust it according to the actual situation when you have accumulated a wealth of practical experience, don't worry about whether you want to execute scrum or other agile methods, that is, starting from scratch.