Introduction to Scrum

by Hubert Smits

Copyright 2003-2007, Rally Software Development Corp Confidential and Proprietary

Background — Hubert Smits
• Agile Coach & Mentor for Rally Software Development
• 25 years experience in managing large software
development projects in Europe
• Mentoring Agile Implementations in the US, Europe,
Israel and India
• Former university lecturer in Agile Software
Development at Glasgow University
• Certified Scrum Trainer
• Author of “Five Levels of Agile Planning”
• Co-author of “A CIO’s Playbook for
Adopting Scrum”

[email protected]
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Purpose

“To learn about the Scrum Process and

the role of the ScrumMaster
the Product Owner and the Team.”

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Or:

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump,

bump, bump, on the back of his head. It is, as far as
he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but
sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if
only he could stop bumping for a moment and think
of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't.

-- A. A. Milne

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The Agenda
• Introduction to Agile & Scrum
• The Scrum Process
• Scrum Roles & Responsibilities
• Scrum in Detail
• Scaling Scrum
• Getting started with Scrum
• Closing

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Agile – What and why

Copyright 2003-2007, Rally Software Development Corp Confidential and Proprietary

Reference point – Waterfall / Plan-Driven / BDUF
• Information known
Requirements
up front
• Manage and reduce risk
• Change is expensive Design

• Contractual (“sign off”)

• Document-centric Code and
unit test

System
Integration

Operation and
maintenance

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Agile — Project Vision Drives the Features

Waterfall Agile
The Plan creates The Vision creates
cost/schedule estimates feature estimates

Fix These Features Cost Schedule

Value / Vision
Driven
Plan
Driven

Estimate These Cost Schedule Features

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 The Agile Manifesto*

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right,

we value the items on the left more.”

* www.agilemanifesto.org

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Agile Methods

a l
t
ing m M an ry
s
m r u S D DD L e C
r am S c D F
og
P r
e
m
tre
Ex

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Scrum Core Elements

Copyright 2003-2007, Rally Software Development Corp Confidential and Proprietary

Scrum Roots
• Hirotaka Takeuchi & Ikojuri Nonaka
• The New New Product Development Game
• Harvard Business Review – Jan/Feb 1986
• Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaber
• First used during a project at Easel Corp 1993
• Agile Software Development with Scrum, Ken Schwaber and
Mike Beedle, Prentice Hall, 2001
• Agile Project Management with Scrum, Ken Schwaber,
Microsoft Press, 2004

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 The Scrum Framework

Daily Scrum Meeting

• Done since last meeting
• Plan for today
• Obstacles?
24 hours

Planning Meeting
• Review Product Backlog Backlog tasks 2 weeks
• Estimate Sprint Backlog expanded
• Commit to 2 weeks of work
by team

Vision
Product Backlog:
Prioritized Features Potentially Shippable
desired by Customer Sprint Backlog Product Increment
Features assigned to Sprint
Estimated by team Review Meeting
• Demo features to all
• Retrospective on the Sprint

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 Agile Principle:
Satisfy the customer through delivery of valuable software

Vision
Product Backlog:
Prioritized Features
desired by Customer

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Product Backlog Physics

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And a tool view

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Agile Principle: Deliver working software

Potentially Shippable
Product Increment

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Agile Principle: Deliver working software frequently

2 weeks

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Mini waterfall?

VI
Analysis /
Architecture
Acceptance Acceptance
Test Test

Design
Integration
Test
Integration
Test

Code /
Unit Test

Code /
Unit Test
time

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 Tracking Work Remaining –“What’s left to do?”
Sprint 3 for MultiVue Install 9/27 9/28 9/29 9/30 10/1 10/4 10/5 10/6 10/7 10/8
days rem aining 32 29 28 26 24 23 22 0 0 0
IT Team Tasks
Task description Com m it Status 256 231 224 207 188 181 178 0 0 0
Requirem ents Com ponent
Project Requirements Gathering Campbell Completed 16 12 8 4 2 0
Formal Requirements Documentation Campbell In progress 8 4 4 4 4 4 4
MultiVue Configuration Com ponent
Append Additional Demographics Campbell Not started 16 16 16 16 16 16 16
SAP database Com ponent
Design SAP Database Campbell Completed 16 16 12 8 6 2 0
Creation of the SAP Database Jan Completed 4 12 16 8 0
Create stored procedures on SAP database Campbell Not started 12 12 12 12 12 12 12
SAP Code Com ponent
Creation of SAP .NET Component Jan In progress 16 16 16 16 10 10 10
Creation of SAP Web Application Jan Not started 16 16 16 16 16 16 16
SAP Security
Creation of Security Administration Site Campbell Not started 24 24 24 24 24 24 24
Secure Messenging Campbell Not started 12 12 12 12 12 12 12
Security Integration Jan Not started 12 12 12 12 12 12 12
SAP system testing Campbell Not started 8 8 8 8 8 8 8
SAP System Verification Campbell Not started 8 8 8 8 8 8 8
SAP Hardening
Bug Fixing / Cosmetic Changes Mark In progress 16 12 12 11 10 9 8
Install in Live Environment Campbell Not started 16 16 16 16 16 16 16
BizTalk 2004 Com ponent
Extend ePEX-3 Adaptor Campbell Not started 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
Extend Sw ift Adaptor Mark Completed 8 3 0
Extend Upstream Schemas Mark Not started 8 8 8 8 8 8 8
Create AIC schema Campbell Not started 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
Create Mappings Campbell Not started 16 16 16 16 16 16 16
Create SAP AIC Mark Completed 16 0

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Sprint Burndown Chart
Remaining work (days) Sprint 3 (MultiVue Install)

35 21

30 18

25 15
Working days

# Features
20 12

15 9

10 6

5 3

0 0
27

28

29

30

/1

/4

/5

/6

/7

/8

8
1

6
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/2

/2

/2

/2

/2
10

10

10

10

10

10
9/

9/

9/

9/

10

10

10

10

10

10

10

10

10

10

10

10
Date

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Release Burn-up

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Agile Principle: Welcome change

Sprint Planning Meeting

• Review Product Backlog
Backlog tasks
• Estimate Sprint Backlog
• Commit to 2 weeks of work expanded
by team

Sprint Backlog
Features assigned to Sprint
Estimated by team

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Sample Sprint Plan

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Sample Sprint Backlog
Sprint 3 for MultiVue Install 9/27 9/28 9/29 9/30 10/1
days rem aining 32 0 0 0 0
IT Team Tasks
Task description Com m it Status 256 0 0 0 0
Requirem ents Com ponent
Project Requirements Gathering Campbell Not started 16
Formal Requirements Documentation Campbell Not started 8
MultiVue Configuration Com ponent
Append Additional Demographics Campbell Not started 16
SAP database Com ponent
Design SAP Database Campbell Not started 16
Creation of the SAP Database Campbell Not started 4
Create stored procedures on SAP database Campbell Not started 12
SAP Code Com ponent
Creation of SAP .NET Component Jan Not started 16
Creation of SAP Web Application Jan Not started 16
SAP Security
Creation of Security Administration Site Campbell Not started 24
Secure Messenging Campbell Not started 12
Security Integration Jan Not started 12
SAP system testing Campbell Not started 8
SAP System Verification Campbell Not started 8
SAP Hardening
Bug Fixing / Cosmetic Changes Mark Not started 16
Install in Live Environment Campbell Not started 16
BizTalk 2004 Com ponent
Extend ePEX-3 Adaptor Campbell Not started 4
Extend Sw ift Adaptor Mark Not started 8
Extend Upstream Schemas Mark Not started 8
Create AIC schema Campbell Not started 4
Create Mappings Campbell Not started 16
Create SAP AIC Mark Not started 16

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Sprint Consensus

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Agile Principle: Self organizing teams

Daily Scrum Meeting

• Done since last meeting
• Plan for today
• Obstacles? 24 hours

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Hold a Daily Scrum/Standup
• Rules: Daily Scrum Meeting
• Done since last
• Daily, 15-minute status meeting meeting
• Plan for today
• Same time, same place every day • Obstacles?
24 hours

• Stand-up, no problem solving

• Each team member answers three questions:
• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you doing today?
• What is getting in your way?
• Stakeholders are invited to observe but can’t talk:
• Take issues to ScrumMaster after the Standup has ended

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Multiple teams – Scrum of Scrums
• Synchronize within teams
• Synchronize across teams
Daily Scrums
per Sprint

Sprint 1 9:00AM
9:15AM

9:15AM
Sprint 2 9:30AM

9:15AM
9:30AM

Sprint 3

9:45AM
10:00AM

Scrum of Scrums

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Agile Principle: Reflect regularly on process and product

Sprint Review Meeting

• Demo features to all
• Retrospective on the Sprint

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Sprint Demo and Review
• Team presents what it accomplished during the Sprint
• Typically takes the form of a demo of new features or
underlying architecture
• Informal
• 2-hour prep time rule
• Attendees
• Team (Customer Representative, Developers, Testers,
Architect, etc.)
• ScrumMaster
• Product Owner, Customers
• Stakeholders
• All other interested parties
• No PowerPoint

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Sprint Retrospective
• Inspection of process and team practices at the end of
every Sprint
• Attended only by the delivery team
• Facilitated by ScrumMaster or third party
• What went well, what could be improved
• ScrumMaster prioritizes improvements
based on team direction
• Team devises solution to most vexing
problems

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Scrum Can Expose Mess

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 Presto: The Scrum Framework!

Daily Scrum Meeting

• Done since last meeting
• Plan for today
• Obstacles?
24 hours

Planning Meeting
• Review Product Backlog Backlog tasks 2 weeks
• Estimate Sprint Backlog expanded
• Commit to 2 weeks of work
by team

Vision
Product Backlog:
Prioritized Features Potentially Shippable
desired by Customer Sprint Backlog Product Increment
Features assigned to Sprint
Estimated by team Review Meeting
• Demo features to all
• Retrospective on the Sprint

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Scrum asks the Product Owner to…
• Have a vision or theme for the Product, the Release,
and the Sprint
• Be responsible for the Product, ROI, Features, Cost
• Maintain a prioritized Product Backlog of User Stories
• Seek guidance from architects, testers, developers
• Respect team estimates
• Communicate often
• Accept stories as they are completed

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The Scrum Delivery Team
• Whoever is needed to complete the product increment
• Developers, Analysts, Designers, Architects
• Testers & QA people, Usability Engineers, Tech Writers
• Other contributing experts
• AND Product Owner

• Activities
• Commit to the Sprint
• Own the estimates
• Plan their own work
• Have the authority to do whatever is needed to meet their
commitment

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Scrum Teams Are Compact
• Seven plus or minus two
• Preferably co-located, go fast through face-to-face
communication
• Preferably cross-functional with flexible roles
• Scrum scales by adding teams, not increasing team
size

• Look at
http://www.xp123.com/xplor/room-gallery/index.shtml
for an impression of team rooms

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ScrumMaster Characteristics
• Owns the implementation of the method
• Is a Servant Leader and Facilitator
• Can be from any number of team roles, sometimes a
Project Manager or Team Lead
• Can be a full-time role or
• Run multiple Sprints at the same time?
• Act as a team member, delivering functionality?
• Used to be called Project Manager but:
• Is not the decision-maker
• Cannot commit to dates, budgets, profits, etc.
• Facilitates the team and stakeholders
to do so

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Other Roles
• PMO, Directors, Specialists, etc.
• Only the fully committed can speak in daily meetings
• Contributors only get to observe
• Coordinate with ScrumMaster on matters
• Participate in and contribute to planning

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Scrum Vocabulary

s p r i n t
i n c r e m e n t
p r o d u c t o w n e r
s c r u m
t e a m
c o m m i t
b a c k l o g
s t a n d u p
t a s k
f e a t u r e
r h y t h m

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Questions?

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Reference Materials

Copyright 2003-2007, Rally Software Development Corp Confidential and Proprietary

Resources on Scrum
• Suggested URLs:
• Home of Scrum: www.scrumalliance.org
• Agile Alliance: www.agilealliance.com
• Jeff Sutherland www.jeffsutherland.com
• Mike Cohn www.mountaingoatsoftware.com
• Rally Software: www.rallydev.com
• My blog: hubert.blogs.com
• Yahoo Groups: scrumdevelopment, XP, XPUK, agiletesting

• Suggested Reading:
• Agile Software Development with Scrum, Ken Schwaber and
Mike Beedle, Prentice Hall, 2002.
• Agile Project Management with Scrum, Ken Schwaber,
Microsoft Press, 2004.

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Other Readings
• Collaboration Explained, Jean Tabaka, Addison Wesley, 2006
• Agile Retrospectives, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, Pragmatic
Programmer, 2006
• User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn, Pearson Education, 2004
• Extreme Programming Explained, Kent Beck, Addison Wesley,
2000
• Corps Business, David Freedman, HarperCollins, 2000
• Project Retrospectives, Norman Kerth, Dorset House, 2001
• The Art of Focused Conversation, Brian Stanfield, New Society
Publishers, 2000
• The Knowledge Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi, Oxford
University Press, 1995
• Lean Software Development, Poppendieck and Poppendieck,
Addison Wesley, 2003

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Case Studies

Copyright 2003-2007, Rally Software Development Corp Confidential and Proprietary

Case Study #1 – Wildcard Systems
• Tim Dorsey:
• SVP of Performance at Wildcard applying 6 Sigma and Lean
• Founded 1997—move from cash to electronic payments, prepaid
payment card services, gift cards
• 2004 revenues $57M, 40-50% growth globally
• 50 clients, 12 million cards issued:
• In 2000, 700 million transactions
• In 2004, 3.45 billion transactions
• Pain:
• System was a catastrophe waiting to happen due to fast growth; no
fallback position because of growth
• Customer feedback: not friendly, product always late, lots of defects
• Low employee morale: 82% didn’t like coming to work, resourced
across multiple projects, lots of overtime

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Case Study #1 – Wildcard Systems
• Approach:
• Executive Support
• Fired SVP Sales because he was opposed to the change
• Spoke executive language in order to go enterprise-
wide
• Apply Scrum: process, operational teams,
organizational infrastructure, client involvement,
cultural and behavioral shift
• Enterprise-wide Agile: strategic alignment,
organizational development (team building),
organizational analysis (metrics), implementing for
results

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Case Study #1 – Wildcard Systems
• Lessons Learned:
• Strategic alignment—
• Create vision, values, and mission
• Get professional coaching
• Create a communications structure that supports high
visibility
• Require burndown charts and metrics from the start
• Organizational development—
• Implement strong review process
• Time box meetings
• Bring in the clients to Daily Standup
• Entire team collaboration (Product owner/ScrumMaster don’t
“own” the team)
• Operational bottlenecks exposed

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Case Study #2 – Yahoo!
• Pete Deemer:
• Yahoo! Founded 1995
• Show up at work and just build stuff
• Late 2000—no more spending, impose control, hired Accenture
and adopted Waterfall for 4 years
• September 2004—Jeff Sutherland brown bag for 100 engineers;
immediately invited to speak to Executive Team Meeting
• Approach:
• 4 Pilot Projects, 3 outside consultants (Collaboration, Process,
Project Management)
• Began with religious adherence to Scrum then adapt after first
Sprint
• Anonymous survey at end: 90% response rate:
• It’s tough, but we love how much we accomplished, the cooperation,
quality of work life, don’t want to stop

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Case Study #2 – Yahoo!
• 8 teams now running Scrum, more queued up
• Some learnings from their 6 months:
• Start with teams that WANT to be Agile and with evangelists
• Call it a pilot program (“We’re not migrating TO anything”)
• Present the practices as common sense; change is scary
• Patience is a virtue: start small, don’t over-extend and risk
failure
• Use Agile pragmatically, adaptively; it’s simple but hard
• Set a high bar with low expectations
• Be prepared to watch the nasty issues become painfully visible
• Get experienced help
• Spend the most time with the people who like Agile the least
• Make the result highly visible, especially good information,
wins

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Case Study #3 – Learning.com
• Hosted web solution for schools to integrate computer
and technology education into their curricula—over 1
million users
• EasyTech®—online technology literacy curriculum
• Pain:
• Needed reliable delivery of functions coinciding with school
year start dates
• Needed to be able to tie development priorities directly to
changing customer needs, corporate performance, strategic
planning
• 2 Product Managers,10 Developers, co-located

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Case Study #3 – Learning.com
• Solution:
• 2-week iterations
• Initial focus on agile project management and prioritized backlog
• Rally tool for web-based visibility for Development, QA team, as
well as Marketing and Tech Support

• Results:
• Transitioned from reactive to “in control” in one month
• Smarter trade-offs and support for profit-driven decision making
• Unified view of business and software development across entire
company
• Improved productivity in reduced meeting time (10
hours/member/month)

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Case Study #4 – Primavera
• Bob Schatz—Primavera, Solstice Software
• 100 person Development organization
• Decided to push entire organization to Scrum
• Entire management team on board

• Approach:
• “The Hurricane System”— Introduce Agile Hurricane
Disaster/destruction Rioting Calm  Introduce more of the
Agile practices
• Outside consulting
• Team rooms
• Town Hall Project Meetings (“Scrum of Scrums”)
• Information radiators
• Feature budgeting
• Iteration defect limits (tradeoff in favor of quality)
• NO overtime or weekends
• Customer Webex Iteration demos

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Case Study #4 – Primavera
• Results:
• Reduced defects by 75%
• Year one: 1200600 by simply applying Scrum team
practices
• Year two: 600300 by applying XP engineering practices
• Now Test Driven Development
• Implementation of Agile requires:
• Leaders (Identify champions, leverage power and influence)
• Knowledge (Seek mentoring)
• Skill (Agile is simple but hard!)
• Adaptive techniques (“Inspect and adapt”)

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End

Copyright 2003-2007, Rally Software Development Corp Confidential and Proprietary