We have listened to and read a lot about scrum, what it is and how to apply it in our projects. But today we will shed some light on a book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. The book is written by Jeff Sutherland where he described WHY we need scrum methodologies. Jeff Sutherland is one of the creators of scrum which is a framework for developing, delivering, and maintaining complex products or projects. He shared his experiences; he applied the methodologies that helped him to complete the projects on time and within the budget. These methodologies later became the Scrum model.
What is the problem?
The author started the book with the problem of what scrum solves. He discussed the traditional way of doing projects, normally referred to as the waterfall model. In the waterfall model, the organization completes the planning phase at the start of the project. Once planning is done, the execution will be completely dependent on that planning, leaving no space for change (effectively). In software development, changes are obvious. With the waterfall model, the process of software development usually didn’t meet the deadline and the budget. Also, as no stakeholder was involved during the execution of the project, so most of the time, the end project is far different than the client asked for.
Scrum is the Solution
As discussed earlier, Scrum is a result of gradual improvements in the traditional methodologies. As mentioned in the book, Jeff analyzed the projects after completion or during completion and then improved his way of doing stuff. Which resulted in Scrum Model.
Scrum is an agile development methodology used in software development. It’s built on top of traditional methods using iterative and incremental processes. Scrum is an adaptable, fast, flexible, and effective agile framework. It is designed to deliver value to the customer throughout the development of the project.
We mentioned agile development methodologies above. The Agile methodology is a way to manage a project by breaking it up into several phases. It involves constant collaboration with stakeholders and continuous improvement at every stage. Scrum is one of the frameworks to implement the agile methodology.
Let’s start discussing each phase briefly.
Why continuous inspection is important?
At the very start, the Author proved why Continuous inspection or analysis is important during the implementation of the project. Throughout the implementation phase of the project, you need to assess whether you are on the right track or not. And if anything is going wrong, so what measures you must take to be back on track.
So, how do you do continuous Inspection? Actually, you divide your big complex tasks into small milestones and after each milestone, you observe and assess your options and then move forward. And at any stage, if you observe anything going wrong, you analyze your options, make a decision, and then act on it. It’s better to fail fast so that you can fix it early to avoid a bigger impact.
Practice the philosophy of continuous improvement. Get a little bit better every single day.
Brian Tracy
Build the right team
Now you get the idea, how you can inspect/ analyze continuously. The next thing to do is, you need to work on the small milestones. These small milestones will help you to complete your project. To achieve your milestone, make sure you have all the required resources available. Minimize the dependency on anyone outside the team. And calculate the overall performance and progress as a team, not individually.
For example, if you are working on an e-commerce application, then your team must include the project manager, frontend developers, backend developers, mobile developers, testers, and so on. By having all the required resources available for your project, you can minimize the completion time by removing needless dependency among different departments of an organization.
Planning is everything
Once you have got the right people to work on a project. Now it’s time to plan your project. While doing this activity, you consider each and everything that is needed to be done. Once you have all the tasks written down, you can sort them based on the priority and the impact that they will have on the overall system. The higher the impact, the higher the priority is. Consider the 80/20 rule, which says, 80% of the value of a system lies in 20% of the system. This whole list of tasks is referred to as Backlog and while planning each milestone, you pick tasks from this backlog.
For planning a milestone (called Sprint in scrum), you go to your backlog. And observe, what can you accomplish in a regular set of times. A sprint (milestone) is normally to be between one to four weeks. You have to make sure, that you only pick those tasks, that are accomplishable. Because at the end of the sprint, you must have something that works.
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Time for implementation
Once you have planned your sprints and now is the time to do the implementation. Throughout the life cycle of the scrum, the goal is to complete the project most smoothly. For that, you can take several steps.
- You have to make sure that you do 1 task at a time. Multitasking slows you down.
- When you are working on a sprint, you make sure that at the end of the sprint you will provide something that actually works. For example, if you are building an e-commerce website, it doesn’t let you place the order, so what do you achieve? Definitely, you are not going to show broken software to your stakeholders.
- When anything goes wrong, fix it right away. Stop everything and work on it. Delaying it will take more than 20 times longer if you fix it now. For example; In the Toyota plant, when anything goes wrong on the assembly line, every worker has the authority to stop the whole assembly line. After that, the whole team gathers where the line stopped and fixes the problem right at the moment. They fix the problem and solve it forever. Delaying it could cause the same defect in hundreds of vehicles.
- Remove the dependency as much as possible, remove unproductive meetings, and policies. Don’t get trapped into stupid policies and focus on the real stuff. Choose the smoothest way to get things done.
- While planning your sprint. Your goal should be reasonable. Don’t make unrealistic deadlines or targets that you cannot achieve. Otherwise, to complete the sprint, you will have to work hard and spend some extra time. Working too hard only makes more work. It results in fatigue, which leads to errors. Usually, teams succeed to complete the sprint by heroic efforts. But actually, it’s a failure. You must plan and make a goal that is achievable within the dedicated time slot.
Track Your Progress
To track the progress of the sprint, you do a daily meeting, (referred to as a daily scrum meeting). In this meeting, all of the team members participate and you normally ask your team members 3 questions.
- What did you do yesterday?
- What you will be doing today?
- Is there any blocker?
The overall aim of the meeting is to increase the speed of the team and observe if everything is on track. Daily scrum helps to resolve the dependency within the team if there is any.
Evaluate your performance
Scrum is not a destination, it’s a journey. This means, that after the completion of each sprint, you analyze the performance, make decisions for the improvements and move on to the next sprint. Throughout the journey, you must keep the team motivated. For this, you can do a retrospective after each sprint. Sprint retrospective normally consists of three questions.
- Start: What is still missing? What steps your team can take to achieve more productivity? You pick these points, analyze them and apply them in your next sprint.
- Stop: What went wrong? What are the things that created trouble during the sprint? Either you improve it, or you remove it. But you make sure not to repeat these mistakes.
- Continue: In this step, you identify, what your team achieved and what went well. You celebrate the achievements but you make sure that you keep your momentum and continue these achievements for the upcoming sprints.
Conclusion
We have been using Scrum in our organization. Being a product-based organization, scrum has helped us a lot to achieve the milestones in the smoothest way possible. Although there are a lot of factors that sometimes slow down the overall productivity of the team. But with the concept of continuous improvement, we take suitable measures to maintain productivity.
We would love to hear from you guys, how scrum has improved the processes in your organizations. Or if you have given priority to any other methodology, please share with us.
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