An Introduction to Scrum

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Mountain Goat Software, LLC

We’re losing the relay race

“ The… ‘relay race’ approach to product

development…may conflict with the goals of
maximum speed and flexibility. Instead a
holistic or ‘rugby’ approach—where a team
tries to go the distance as a unit, passing the
ball back and forth—may better serve today’s
competitive requirements.”
Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, “ The
New New Product Development Game” ,
Harvard Business Review, January 1986.

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Scrum in 100 words

• Scrum is an agile process that allows us to focus on

delivering the highest business value in the shortest time.
• It allows us to rapidly and repeatedly inspect actual working
software (every two weeks to one month).
• The business sets the priorities. Teams self-organize to
determine the best way to deliver the highest priority
features.
• Every two weeks to a month anyone can see real working
software and decide to release it as is or continue to enhance
it for another sprint.

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Scrum origins
• Jeff Sutherland
• Initial scrums at Easel Corp in 1993
• IDX and 500+ people doing Scrum
• Ken Schwaber
• ADM
• Scrum presented at OOPSLA 96 with
Sutherland
• Author of three books on Scrum
• Mike Beedle
• Scrum patterns in PLOPD4
• Ken Schwaber and Mike Cohn
• Co-founded Scrum Alliance in 2002, initially
within the Agile Alliance
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Scrum has been used by:
•Microsoft •Intuit
•Yahoo •Nielsen Media
•Google •First American Real Estate
•Electronic Arts •BMC Software
•High Moon Studios •Ipswitch
•Lockheed Martin •John Deere
•Philips •Lexis Nexis
•Siemens •Sabre
•Nokia •Salesforce.com
•Capital One •Time Warner
•BBC •Turner Broadcasting
•Intuit •Oce
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Scrum has been used for:
• Commercial software • Video game development
• In-house development • FDA-approved, life-critical
systems
• Contract development
• Fixed-price projects
• Satellite-control software

• Financial applications
• Websites

• ISO 9001-certified
• Handheld software
applications • Mobile phones
• Embedded systems • Network switching applications
• 24x7 systems with 99.999% • ISV applications
uptime requirements
• Some of the largest applications in
• the Joint Strike Fighter use

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Characteristics
• Self-organizing teams
• Product progresses in a series of month-long
“ sprints”
• Requirements are captured as items in a list of
“ product backlog”
• No specific engineering practices prescribed
• Uses generative rules to create an agile
environment for delivering projects
• One of the “ agile processes”

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The Agile Manifesto–a statement of
values

Individuals
Individuals and
and over Process
Process and
and tools
tools
interactions
interactions
Comprehensive
Comprehensive
Working
Working software
software over
documentation
documentation

Customer
Customer collaboration
collaboration over Contract
Contract negotiation
negotiation

Responding
Responding to
to change
change over Following
Following aa plan
plan

Source: www.agilemanifesto.org
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Project noise level

Far from
Agreement
Anarchy
Requirements

Complex
Co
m
pl
ica Source: Strategic Management and
ted Organizational Dynamics by Ralph Stacey
in Agile Software Development with Scrum

Close to Simple by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle.

Agreement
Technology
Close to
Certainty

Far from
Certainty
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Scrum 24 hours

Sprint
2-4 weeks
Sprint goal
Return
Sprint Potentially shippable
Cancel
Return backlog product increment
Gift
Coupons
wrap
Gift
Cancel
wrap Coupons
Product
backlog

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Putting it all together

Image available at
www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum
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Sprints

• Scrum projects make progress in a series of

“ sprints”
• Analogous to Extreme Programming iterations
• Typical duration is 2–4 weeks or a calendar
month at most
• A constant duration leads to a better rhythm
• Product is designed, coded, and tested during
the sprint

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Sequential vs. overlapping
development

Requirements Design Code Test

Rather than doing all of

one thing at a time...
...Scrum teams do a little
of everything all the time

Source: “ The New New Product Development Game” by Takeuchi

and Nonaka. Harvard Business Review, January 1986.
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No changes during a sprint

Change

• Plan sprint durations around how long you can

commit to keeping change out of the sprint

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Scrum framework
Roles
•Product owner
•ScrumMaster
•Team Ceremonies
•Sprint planning
•Sprint review
•Sprint retrospective
•Daily scrum meeting
Artifacts
•Product backlog
•Sprint backlog
•Burndown charts
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Scrum framework
Roles
•Product owner
•ScrumMaster
•Team Ceremonies
•Sprint planning
•Sprint review
•Sprint retrospective
•Daily scrum meeting
Artifacts
•Product backlog
•Sprint backlog
•Burndown charts
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Product owner

• Define the features of the product

• Decide on release date and content
• Be responsible for the profitability of the
product (ROI)
• Prioritize features according to market value
• Adjust features and priority every iteration, as
needed 
• Accept or reject work results

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The ScrumMaster
• Represents management to the project
• Responsible for enacting Scrum values and practices
• Removes impediments
• Ensure that the team is fully functional and
productive
• Enable close cooperation across all roles and
functions
• Shield the team from external interferences

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The team
• Typically 5-9 people
• Cross-functional:
• Programmers, testers, user experience designers, etc.
• Members should be full-time
• May be exceptions (e.g., database administrator)

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The team

• Teams are self-organizing

• Ideally, no titles but rarely a possibility
• Membership should change only between sprints

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Scrum framework
Roles
•Product owner
•ScrumMaster
•Team
Ceremonies
•Sprint planning
•Sprint review
•Sprint retrospective
•Daily scrum meeting
Artifacts
•Product backlog
•Sprint backlog
•Burndown charts
Mountain Goat Software, LLC
 Team
Sprint planning meeting
Team
capacity
capacity
Sprint prioritization
Product
Product
• Analyze and evaluate product Sprint
Sprint
backlog goal
backlog
backlog
• Select sprint goal
goal
Business
Business
conditions
conditions Sprint planning
• Decide how to achieve sprint goal
(design)
Current
Current Sprint
Sprint
product
product • Create sprint backlog (tasks) from
product backlog items (user backlog
backlog
stories / features)
Technology
Technology • Estimate sprint backlog in hours

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Sprint planning
• Team selects items from the product backlog they can
commit to completing
• Sprint backlog is created
• Tasks are identified and each is estimated (1-16 hours)
• Collaboratively, not done alone by the ScrumMaster
• High-level design is considered

As
As aa vacation
vacation Code the middle tier (8 hours)
planner,
planner, II want
want to
to Code the user interface (4)
see
see photos
photos of
of the
the
Write test fixtures (4)
Code the foo class (6)
hotels.
hotels. Update performance tests (4)

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The daily scrum
• Parameters
• Daily
• 15-minutes
• Stand-up
• Not for problem solving
• Whole world is invited
• Only team members, ScrumMaster, product
owner, can talk
• Helps avoid other unnecessary meetings
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Everyone answers 3 questions
1
What did
did you do yesterday?
yesterday?

2
What will you do
do today?
today?

3
Is anything in your way?
• These are not status for the ScrumMaster
• They are commitments in front of peers
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The sprint 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
• No slides
• Whole team participates
• Invite the world
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Sprint retrospective
• Periodically take a look at what is and is not
working
• Typically 15–30 minutes
• Done after every sprint
• Whole team participates
• ScrumMaster
• Product owner
• Team
• Possibly customers and others

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Start / Stop / Continue

• Whole team gathers and discusses what they’d

like to:
Start doing

Stop doing
This is just one
of many ways to Continue doing
do a sprint
retrospective.

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Scrum framework
Roles
•Product owner
•ScrumMaster
•Team Ceremonies
•Sprint planning
•Sprint review
•Sprint retrospective
•Daily scrum meeting
Artifacts
•Product backlog
•Sprint backlog
•Burndown charts
Mountain Goat Software, LLC
Product backlog
• The requirements
• A list of all desired work on the
project
• Ideally expressed such that
each item has value to the users
or customers of the product
• Prioritized by the product
owner
• Reprioritized at the start of
each sprint
This
This is
is the
the
product
product backlog
backlog
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A sample product backlog
Backlog item Estimate
Allow a guest to make a reservation 3

As a guest, I want to cancel a reservation. 5

As a guest, I want to change the dates of a

3
reservation.
As a hotel employee, I can run RevPAR
8
reports (revenue-per-available-room)
Improve exception handling 8
... 30
... 50
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The sprint goal
• A short statement of what the work will be
focused on during the sprint
Life Sciences
Support features necessary for
Database Application population genetics studies.

Make the application run on SQL

Server in addition to Oracle.
Financial services
Support more technical indicators
than company ABC with real-time,
streaming data.

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Managing the sprint backlog
• Individuals sign up for work of their own choosing
• Work is never assigned
• Estimated work remaining is updated daily

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Managing the sprint backlog
• Any team member can add, delete or change the
sprint backlog
• Work for the sprint emerges
• If work is unclear, define a sprint backlog item with
a larger amount of time and break it down later
• Update work remaining as more becomes known

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A sprint backlog

Tasks
Tasks Mon
Mon Tues
Tues Wed
Wed Thur
Thur Fri
Fri
Code the user interface 8 4 8
Code the middle tier 16 12 10 4
Test the middle tier 8 16 16 11 8
Write online help 12
Write the foo class 8 8 8 8 8
Add error logging 8 4

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A sprint burndown chart
Hours

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 Tasks
Tasks Mon
Mon Tues
Tues Wed
Wed Thur
Thur Fri
Fri
Code the user interface 8 4 8
Code the middle tier 16 12 10 7
Test the middle tier 8 16 16 11 8
Write online help 12

50
40
30
Hours

20
10
0
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri

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Scalability
• Typical individual team is 7 ± 2 people
• Scalability comes from teams of teams
• Factors in scaling
• Type of application
• Team size
• Team dispersion
• Project duration
• Scrum has been used on multiple 500+ person
projects

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Scaling through the Scrum of scrums

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Scrum of scrums of scrums

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Where to go next

• www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum
• www.scrumalliance.org
• www.controlchaos.com
• [email protected]

Mountain Goat Software, LLC

A Scrum reading list
• Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide by Craig
Larman
• Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn
• Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber
• Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen

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A Scrum reading list
• Agile Software Development Ecosystems by Jim Highsmith
• Agile Software Development with Scrum by Ken Schwaber and
Mike Beedle
• Scrum and The Enterprise by Ken Schwaber
• Succeeding with Agile by Mike Cohn
• User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development by Mike
Cohn

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Copyright notice
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• to Share―to copy, distribute and and transmit the work
• to Remix―to adapt the work
• Under the following conditions
• Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by
the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they
endorse you or your use of the work).

• Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the

author’s moral rights.
• For more information see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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Contact information
Presentation
Presentation by:
by: Mike
Mike Cohn
Cohn
[email protected]
[email protected]
www.mountaingoatsoftware.com
www.mountaingoatsoftware.com
(720)
(720) 890-6110
890-6110 (office)
(office)

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