When prestigious companies all around the world started using a process like SCRUM to get their projects to finish successfully and on the amount of time required, other smaller business got to know. Now SCRUM is a well-known framework for projects that are long and complex.
It is specially designed for high-performance among the team, and its design is conceived to get high productivity margins during otherwise extenuating and meticulous development sessions.
Companies don’t often know how to predict a market situation, and when they know, it is often too late for some projects. SCRUM helps to avoid badly-timed decisions during the development process of most projects. Ill-timed decisions can often have catastrophic consequences for projects. SCRUM allows the development process to be changed. Employees can modify the course of a series of decisions while they are being applied. This way, a project can be as current as the moment it was finished, contrasting with projects that are as current as the moment they were conceived.
When is SCRUM used?
Scrum is mainly used during complex stages of development in which quick results are to be expected, and the parameters of the project are changing or are not well defined. This can include situations such as website development. Let’s also consider that SCRUM is used in environments in which innovation, adequateness, flexibility, and productivity are essential. Visit this website to know more about the uses of Scrum.
SCRUM is also used by developers when they need to solve problems such as: lacking to meet the client’s needs, when having deadlines not being met, when the resources for a project are scarce or when in budget disruptions such as inflation, to react aggressively to the competition, when there are inefficient methods that need to be eradicated or when another specialized method of development has to be used unexpectedly.
But how does it work?
The SCRUM framework is applied in segments. Those segments are called sprints. Each one of them has meaning on their own, and they represent what was obtained after roughly two weeks of hard work.
This sequential method allows the team to perfect each one of the sprints in which they participate so that in the next phase, they will be perfect. The general project is treated in small content blocks, and this warrants the team better flexibility to go forward and develop other stages of the project without having to wait for the other sprints to conclude.
The process of SCRUM
In the SCRUM framework, any project will be executed in many temporal cycles that are short and have a fixed duration. These temporal cycles are known as iterations and are normally three weeks long at most. Each iteration has to produce a result and has to contribute to the final product of the project. This should also be readily available for the client to review at any time.
The process of SCRUM starts with a list of objectives and requisites. This list should be presented in hierarchic order, due to importance. With this list, the client, the Product Owner from now on, can prioritize which will be the objectives. These will be appreciated according to the value they bring to the product in contrast to the cost of producing it. The objectives then are distributed in all the iterations needed to execute them.
The stages of SCRUM
The iteration has to be planned:
First, we select the requisites. This should be done during a two hours period. The Product Owner presents them to the team. Then the team interacts with the PO, and their doubts are resolved.
Secondly, the iteration is planned. This should also be done in two hours. The team designates a task list for the iteration aiming to develop the assigned requisites. The workload should be assigned by everyone involved.
Then the iteration is executed:
Each day a short 15 minutes synchronization reunion is performed. The SCRUM Master has to lead this reunion and help the others focus.
Then the final stages of SCRUM are performed: The inspection and adaptation, in which the Product Owner reviews the requisites solved during the iterations. This lasts 1,5 hours.
Then a retrospect reunion has the team analyze their performance and what needs to be improved in the future to progress adequately.
