Scrum: Novice to Ninja

M. David Green

Description

Why should you use Scrum in your web projects? Simply put, it'll enable your team to get more done in less time.

Scrum is the most popular agile project management methodology used in web projects today. While most Scrum books tend to be lengthy textbooks that cover every detail of Scrum for all types of organizations, this highly practical book concentrates solely on how best to apply Scrum in web and mobile development projects. In it, you'll learn:

• An overview of Scrum fundamentals for web and mobile projects
• Get familiar with Scrum's roles: Scrum master, product owner, team members, and interested observers
• Understand Scrum's rituals: sprint planning meetings, daily standups, work process, demos, and sprint retrospectives
• Gain a thorough understanding of the tools used in Scrum: burndown charts, story cards, sprint backlogs
• Troubleshoot typical Scrum issues

Sujets

• Software Development
• Project Management
• Computers
• Informatique
• Engineering

Informations

• Publié par: SitePoint
• Date de parution: 26 janvier 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9781457199479
• Langue: English

Extrait

Summary of Contents
Preface 1. Introducing Scrum 2. Meet the Team 3. Scrum Roles 4. Scrum Rituals 5. Scrum Artifacts 6. The Scrum Contract 7. The Lifecycle of a Story 8. Working Through Scrum 9. Making Scrum Work for Your Web or Mobile Team 10. Adapting to Scrum
SCRUM: NOVICE TO NINJA

BY M. DAVID GREEN
Scrum: Novice to Ninja

by M. David Green

Copyright © 2016 SitePoint Pty. Ltd.

Product Manager:  Simon Mackie

Technical Reviewer:  David Shirey

English Editor:  Ralph Mason

Cover Designer:  Alex Walker

Illustrator:  Natalia Balska

Author Photograph:  Khaled Sayed

Notice of Rights
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Notice of Liability
The author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors and SitePoint Pty. Ltd., nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages to be caused either directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book, or by the software or hardware products described herein.

Trademark Notice
Rather than indicating every occurrence of a trademarked name as such, this book uses the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner with no intention of infringement of the trademark.

Published by SitePoint Pty. Ltd.

48 Cambridge Street  Collingwood VIC  Australia  3066

Web: www.sitepoint.com
Email: [e-mail]

About M. David Green
M. David Green is a writer and agile business coach, and the founder of Agile That Works ( http://www.agilethatworks.com ), a consultancy that helps people in engineering organizations collaborate to make constant improvement a daily practice.
David studied Anthropology and Sociology at UC Berkeley, and later earned his MBA in Organizational Behavior. He has worked as an engineer, a writer, a designer, a marketing director, and a communications analyst in companies from Fortune 100 giants to tiny high-tech startups in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. He also teaches engineering techniques and agile principles through SitePoint.
With over 10,000 hours of experience on scrum teams under his belt, David enjoys sharing what he's seen to watch others improve their processes. Now he consults with companies to help them apply scrum and agile practices to improve productivity, communication, flexibility, and quality of life for engineers and the people who work with them.

About SitePoint
SitePoint specializes in publishing fun, practical, and easy-to-understand content for web professionals. Visit http://www.sitepoint.com/ to access our blogs, books, newsletters, articles, and community forums. You’ll find a stack of information on JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, mobile development, design, and more.

This book is dedicated to my husband, who reminds me every day what truly matters.
Preface
If you haven't heard about scrum, and you work in web or mobile development, it's time you did. Scrum is a way of organizing engineering teams around time-tested techniques to improve communication, increase the flexibility of the product development process, support constant improvement, and provide a sustainable rhythm for productivity with less pain and more participation.
Scrum offers a core set of operating principles, and supports incredible flexibility for a team to adapt the process to their particular needs. Properly applied, scrum insulates engineers against interruptions and micromanagement while giving product managers the flexibility to adapt to market changes regularly, and the ability to predict how much work the team can take on and complete.
In this book, you will be introduced to the fundamentals of scrum, and given examples that you can apply immediately. And since scrum is as much about the people as it is about the processes, we will introduce you to a typical web and mobile development team, and show you the impact of scrum on their jobs, their working relationships, and the things they care about most in their professions.
Whether you're not sure what scrum is, or you think your scrum process isn't all that it should be, this book can help. Scrum isn't magic, but the results it can produce are well worth taking the time to learn how to apply it effectively.

Who Should Read This Book
This book is for anyone who works in a team to build web or mobile apps: engineers, QA, management, designers, and product managers. It assumes no familiarity with scrum or other project management techniques. While it's aimed at readers who have little understanding of scrum, it will also be useful to those who are currently using scrum, but aren't sure that they're getting the results that they want from it.

Conventions Used
You'll notice that we've used certain typographic and layout styles throughout this book to signify different types of information. Look out for the following items.

Tips, Notes, and Warnings

Tip: Hey, You!
Tips provide helpful little pointers.

Note: Ahem, Excuse Me …
Notes are useful asides that are related—but not critical—to the topic at hand. Think of them as extra tidbits of information.

Important: Make Sure You Always …
… pay attention to these important points.

Warning: Watch Out!
Warnings highlight any gotchas that are likely to trip you up along the way.

Supplementary Materials
https://www.sitepoint.com/premium/books/scrum1
The book's website, containing links, updates, resources, and more. http://community.sitepoint.com/
SitePoint's forums, for help on any tricky web problems. [e-mail]
Our email address, should you need to contact us for support, to report a problem, or for any other reason.

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Chapter 1 Introducing Scrum

What Is Scrum?
If you picked up this book to learn about applying scrum to your web or mobile development team, you may already be familiar with the terms scrum and agile. Perhaps you received this book from your company, or maybe you've been tasked with implementing an agile process in your own organization. Whatever the reason, it's always useful to start with a clear, shared definition of the relevant terms.
Scrum is one of several techniques for managing product development organizations, lumped under the broad category of agile software development. Agile approaches are designed to support iterative, flexible, and sustainable methods for running a product engineering organization.
Among the various agile techniques, scrum is particularly well suited to the types of organizations that develop products such as websites and mobile software. The focus on developing cohesive, modular, measurable features that can be estimated relatively, tracked easily, and that may need to adapt quickly to changing market conditions makes scrum particularly appropriate for these types of projects.
Scrum encourages teams to work in a focused way for a limited period of time on a clearly defined set of features, understanding that the next set of features they may be asked to work on could be unpredictable because of changes in the marketplace, feedback from customers, or any number of factors. Scrum allows teams to develop an improved ability to estimate how much effort it will take to produce a new feature in a relative way, based on the work involved in features they've developed before. And scrum creates the opportunity for a team to reflect on the process and improve it regularly, bringing everybody's feedback into play.

Warning: Don't Confuse Merely Applying Scrum Terms with Actually Using Scrum
A familiar anti-pattern in non-agile organizations looking to mask their process problems is using the terminology of scrum as a labeling system on top of their waterfall techniques and tools. That can create confusion, and even negative associations among people who have seen these terms used incorrectly, and who mistakenly believe they've seen scrum in action.
As we go through this book, you're going to find out more about how scrum functions. You're going to be introduced to all of the aspects of scrum, including its rituals, its artifacts, and the roles that it creates for the people in an organization. We're going to introduce you to a team of people working in a scrum environment, and show you how they adopted scrum in the first place, and how they adapted to it.
Before we get there, it's worthwhile taking a moment to position scrum in its historical context. After all, scrum isn't the only way to organize product development. Scrum came into existence right around the time that web development emerged on the engineering landscape, and it flourished as mobile technology became part of our daily lives. If you consider how scrum works, where it came from, and how we apply it, I think you'll see that there might be a reason for that.

Note: Scrum's Odd Vocabulary
The vocabulary of scrum is distinctive, and may sound odd. That's intentional. Scrum uses terms such as ritual, artifact, and story to make it clear that these concepts are different from related ideas that may be encountered in other project management approaches.

A Brief History of Scrum
The original concept for scrum came out of Japan, introduced in 1986 as part of The New Product Development Game by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. They applied the concept of a scrum, taken from the te