Skip to main content

What are the rules of scrum?


A relatively new person to scrum asked me this question last day. My answer to that person was yes. But really does the scrum have any rules? Scrum is a framework which helps us in developing software. It has very few rules and apart from those basic rules rest of them are guidelines like best practices.

Some of the rules 

  1. The roles of Scrum
    Scrum Master - http://www.theagileschool.com/2012/03/scrummasters-checklist-roles.html
    Product Owner
    Feature Team
  2. The PDCA cycle (http://www.theagileschool.com/2012/05/pdca-scrum-or-agile-why-is-it-important.html )  frequent communication about risks (daily)
    Plan – Sprint planning
    Do – Actual engineering sprint – deliver a potential shippable code
    Check – Sprint review
    Act – Retrospective 

The scrum guide @ http://www.scrum.org/Scrum-Guides will be a good guideline for teams/companies planning to start scrum. If you are following the recommendation in these then you are following scrum.
Apart from these rest of the ceremonies and artifacts are there to help us improve the process. They are best practices. We can make changes in those to adapt to our needs. As we do scrum we will find problems, do a review and act on it, change the process and measure the success.

As your understanding of scrum improves,  you may changes few things. Check The agile manifesto http://agilemanifesto.org/ and see if the changes are in accordance with the principles. If yes go and make those changes, if the changes are against the principles discuss about that, talk to learned people (or contact me :D ). After the brainstorming session you may have a better idea. Implement it and measure the progress. Scrum is journey, you may have to adapt it according to your needs

Some other Guidelines




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

PDCA & SCRUM (or Agile); Why is it important?

The PDCA (Plan DO Check Act) cycle was made popular by Dr. W. Edwards Deming. This is a scientific cyclic process which can be used to improve the process (or product). This is cyclic in nature and usually time boxed. Plan  This is the first stage of the process. During this step the team discusses the objectives, the process and the clear conditions of exit (conditions of acceptance). This stage sets the measurable and achievable goals for the team. DO Team works together to achieve the objective set in the planning phase. Team works with the set of agreed process. Check Once the implantation is done team regroups and verifies the output and compares it to the agreed conditions of acceptance decided during the planning phase. The deviation, if any, is noted down. ACT If any deviation in planned tasks is observed during the Check stage, a root cause analysis is conducted. Team brainstorms and identifies the changes required to prevent such deviatio...

SQL Server: GETDATE() & GETUTCDATE() & different time zones

Most of us will use GetDate() function for providing default value in SQL server columns. This function Returns the current database system timestamp as a   datetime   value without the database time zone offset. This value is derived from the operating system of the computer on which the instance of SQL Server is running. This works perfectly if you don’t have to show reports and such stuffs for users from different time zones. In case you want to store time independent of time zones in some universal format; what will do? Well there is GetUtcDate() function for you. This function will return then UTC date based on the setting of the server on which SQL server is installed. I executed the following function & I got the two different date output values. SELECT  GETDATE() AS Expr1, GETUTCDATE () AS Expr2 2/28/2010 1:27:17 PM ,  2/28/2010 7:57:17 AM SQL Server 2008 SQL Server 2008 has two new DataTypes: date & time You can use them to ret...

Why is potentially shippable product quality important

Agile teams work in iterations. During this period, they are supposed to work on product increments which can be “delivered” at the end of iteration. But how you know that the correct product was delivered? Many teams have different kinds of acceptance criteria and Definition of Done (DoD). But in many cases, this “done” is not the real “done” there might be some testing pending, some integration or review pending or anything else which prevents the actual use of the product increment. Many of these teams will need additional iterations to finish hardening their products. Many teams will implement different types of “gates” or approval steps to move to next stage. The free flow of product will be interrupted. They might end up doing mini waterfall within their agile process. Many don’t even realize this. This results in poor quality and requires additional effort to “harden” the product. Potentially Shippable Product increment The acceptance criteria and DoD should be modified...