My Scrum Journey
In this article, I’m going to tell a story about my journey using scrum software methodology for Software Engineering Project coursework on University of Indonesia.
Scrum is a framework for software development process. Scrum defines roles and provide guidelines for a software development process that addresses weak point that might happend in software (product) development.
Scrum Roles
Product Owner
A product owner’s main focus is to set a clear direction on where the project will take course. A product owner must ensure that the team are delivering the most value and have a strong connection between business stakeholder and the development team.
Scrum Master
The role of scrum master is to glue everything and making sure that scrum being done well. The scrum master also make sure that any setbacks in the current sprint fixed in the next sprint, effectively improving the scrum team.
Development Team
The development team do the work to create a shippable software (deliverables). To do this, they communicate and work with each other throughout the process of scrum.
How our Team
Pre-Sprint
The first step in scrum framework is to plan the whole sprint process which in my groups lasts around 3 weeks. In this step, we make a PBI (Product Backlog Item) which is a breakdown of the task we need to do in the later sprint.
Along with PBI, we also create PRD (Product Requirements Diagram), which defines the value or purpose of a product. The value of the product usually includes a description of a feature in that product and the value that it brings to user.
Sprint Planning
Sprint planning is done at the beginning of every sprit. The purpose of sprint planning is to prepare the task to be done in that sprint. We use kanban board to manage our tasks.
After breaking down the task, we assign a story point to each task according to the weight of each task. The tools we use to do this is called scrum poker
After assigning story point, we assign each task to a development team according to their capabilities.
Daily Stand Up
The daily stand up is kinda like a checkup for your progress or a status report. A daily stand up usually only last for a short amount of time, around 15 minutes. Our team does stand up twice a week.
Sprint Review
Sprint review is when the result of the sprint is evaluated. On our project, the UAT (User Acceptance Test) is cross-checked by stakeholder with our deliverables and find out which UAT pass and which one don’t. Sprint review itself is done at the of the sprint.
Sprint Retrospective
The last step is sprint retrospective, which is a self reflection on what went well, what to improve, and action items (what action we will take). We use the tool easy retro to do this.
Conclusion
Scrum is a pretty nice way to organize your team effectively and manage deliverables especially in a rapid environment where an incremental progess must be made.
