Chris Sims - Scrum: a Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction

Scrum:
a Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction

This overview of roles, artifacts and the sprint cycle is adapted from
The Elements of Scrum
by Chris Sims & Hillary Louise Johnson

Scrum: a Breathtakingly Brief
and Agile Introduction

2012 Chris Sims & Hillary Louise Johnson

Kindle Edition

Published by Dymaxicon

Material in this book has been adapted from The Elements of Scrum by Chris Sims & Hillary Louise Johnson

Table of Contents

Roles

Scrum recognizes only three distinct roles:
product owner,
scrum master,
and team member

The Product Owner Role in a Nutshell:

• holds the vision for the product
• represents the interests of the business
• represents the customers
• owns the product backlog
• orders (prioritizes) the items in the product backlog
• creates acceptance criteria for the backlog items
• is available to answer team members questions

Scrum Master

The scrum master acts as a coach, guiding the team to ever-higher levels of cohesiveness, self-organization, and performance. While a teams deliverable is the product, a scrum masters deliverable is a high-performing, self-organizing team.

The scrum master is the teams good shepherd, its champion, guardian, facilitator, and scrum expert. The scrum master helps the team learn and apply scrum and related agile practices to the teams best advantage. The scrum master is constantly available to the team to help them remove any impediments or road-blocks that are keeping them from doing their work. The scrum master is notwe repeat, notthe teams boss. This is a peer position on the team, set apart by knowledge and responsibilities not rank.

The scrum master role in a Nutshell:

• scrum expert and advisor
• coach
• impediment bulldozer
• facilitator

Team Member

High-performing scrum teams are highly collaborative; they are also self-organizing. The team members doing the work have total authority over how the work gets done. The team alone decides which tools and techniques to use, and which team members will work on which tasks. The theory is that the people who do the work are the highest authorities on how best to do it. Similarly, if the business needs schedule estimates, it is the team members who should create these estimates.

A scrum team should posess all of the skills required to create a potentially shippable product. Most often, this means we will have a team of specialists, each with their own skills to contribute to the teams success. However, on a scrum team, each team members role is not to simply contribute in their special area. The role of each and every team member is to help the team deliver potentially shippable product in each sprint. Often, the best way for a team member to do this is by contributing work in their area of specialty. Other times, however, the team will need them to work outside their area of specialty in order to best move backlog items (aka user stories) from in progress to done. What we are describing is a mindset change from doing my job to doing the job. It is also a change in focus from what we are doing (work) to what is getting done (results).

The Team Member Role in a Nutshell:

• responsible for completing user stories to incrementally increase the value of the product
• self-organizes to get all of the necessary work done
• creates and owns the estimates
• owns the how to do the work decisions
• avoids siloed not my job thinking
  

7 +/- 2

So, how many team members should a scrum team have? The common rule of thumb is seven, plus or minus two. That is, from five to nine. Fewer team members and the team may not have enough variety of skills to do all of the work needed to complete user stories. More team members and the communication overhead starts to get excessive.

Scrum Artifacts

These are the tools we scrum practitioners use to make our process visible.