Scrum Best Practices

Best Practices Guide

Introduction

                 Scrum is a framework which is developed to address complex adaptive problems with the intention of delivering products of highest possible values. It is a lightweight framework which is simple to understand but difficult to master. The Scrum is based on Empiricism. The Scrum values are commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect and scrum pillars are transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

The Scrum Team consists of a Product Owner, the Development Team, and a Scrum Master. Scrum Teams are self-organizing and cross-functional. Sprints contain and consist of the Sprint Planning, Daily Scrums, the development work, the Sprint Review, and the Sprint Retrospective. Scrum artifact’ s are Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog and Increment. It represents work or value to provide transparency and opportunities for inspection and adaptation.

Purpose    

The purpose of this document is to identify, collect and consolidate the best practices based on my experience  share it with a wider audience who can leverage the practices in their process for better project management and productivity.

Best practices

• During the first sprint planning or initial planning of the project, the team in the presence of product owner should create the Definition of Done. The DoD should be revisited during every sprint planning to add or update the criteria.
• During the sprint planning, the team should create a sprint goal and the user stories pulled for the sprint should achieve the sprint goal objective.
• It would be advisable to push the stories added in the middle of the sprint to the product backlog if the story objective does not match with the Sprint goal. We should plan for Limited or zero deviation in Sprint Backlog.
• Always schedule a planning meeting if a user story is added in the middle of the sprint to push the low priority stories to the product backlog which will be replaced by the new story.
• The right phase to perform the story point estimation will be the Product backlog refinement. Planning poker is one of the best estimation techniques. The sprint planning should not be a meeting for story estimation, and it should aim at pulling the stories in to the sprint in agreement with product owner.
• During the sprint planning it would be good to point out the Risk, Roadblocks and dependencies so that it can tracked moving forward.
• It would be advisable to split the large story point user stories into smaller ones to complete the stories in the same sprint. For ex: an 8-point story can be split in to 5- and 3-point user stories.
• Whenever a sprint is cancelled, a meeting should be scheduled to demo the completed items with the product owner and update the completed items in the backlog. The uncompleted stories should be pushed to product backlog.
• All the sprint meetings should be time boxed. The DSU is a meeting to update the individual and project status and not to deep dive into the obstacles faced in the project. Scrum Master should have a meeting with the person facing the obstacle and help in resolving the issue.
• During the sprint retrospective, it is a good practice to add related tasks and user story and assign it to correct person based on the outcome of the retrospective, rather than creating it later.
• It is a good practice to have a pre-demo meeting with product owner one or two day prior to the original sprint review meeting to avoid any last-minute surprises.
• We should always have a wiki page, or a reference page related to the process followed in the project. This can include the estimation technique and the basis of estimate used and how the estimation happening for Spikes, Enablers, User Stories and workflows etc.
• It would be advisable to discuss the Sprint Burn down and velocity charts once in every week to understand the overall status of the project.
• Plan for a Team Building activity once in a month.
• Good practice to implement continuous integration and continuous Testing.
• It would be beneficial to involve full team in release planning, iteration planning, review, and retrospectives
• It is a good practice to involve stakeholders in Sprint planning meeting once in every month for better stakeholder engagement with the team.
• It would be effective to have a one-week sprint before or after each release to facilitate for innovation and developing new skills.

Conclusion

Scrum guide details about the scrum process but it does not restrict the user from customizing the scrum process. The thumb rule in scrum guide is that the organization adopting scrum process should adhere to values, roles, events and artifacts mentioned in the scrum guide and in addition to that they can add their own customization.