In this article, I am going to share with you the process followed in Agile methodology. Usually, there are three main roles involved in the Scrum process.
- Product Owner
The Product Owner is typically a project’s key stakeholder. He/ She is managing the product backlog, detailing requirements and interacting with all the stakeholders and the development team.
- Scrum Master
The scrum master manages the process of how information is exchanged. They are the ones who work closely with the product owner and are involved in removing any impediments to progress, arranging meetings and doing things to make sure the product backlog is in good shape in accordance with the requirements defined and ready for the next sprint. The scrum master does anything possible to help and motivate the team to a higher level.
- Development team
The development team includes the Technical Architects, Analysts, Programmers, Designers, QA experts, Testers, System Admins, etc. They are the team of people who are collectively responsible for delivering the project and doing day-to-day tasks in completing the requirements and fully developing functionality as agreed to in the definition of done.
Activities in SCRUM Methodology
- Grooming meeting
This meeting usually starts two days before the sprint planning meeting. Here, the product owner will be defining the features and the requirements that need to be implemented for a particular product. They will be determining the user stories required for the task/ requirement implementation or feature implementation. They will develop different user stories created by the product owner. They will analyze features or requirements and prioritize the items, what story can be allotted to sprint 1, sprint 2 and so on. Here, they will finalize what are the items to be covered in sprint 1 and future sprints. This will be decided by the scrum master and product owner. The developers do not need to be present at this meeting.
Here, the hierarchy can look as follows,
Idea (Issue) -> Epic -> Product->Project->Feature
- Sprint planning meeting
It will be conducted on the first day of the sprint. The product owner may need to attend this meeting, but all the developers, QA and scrum master should be available.
Here, they will define the user stories. Hence, analyzing and breaking down the tasks to complete the user stories will be done during this meeting. To achieve all this, the team has to submit their planned vacations before the sprint starts.
During sprint planning, they need to estimate the Team Capacity. The capacity of the team during a Sprint is the total number of action items the team is able to complete during that Sprint. It gets calculated based on the team’s history and the developer’s available working hours.
For Example:
For a rwo-weeks sprint, we have a total of 10 days (neglecting Saturday & Sunday). Each developer has 6 working hours per day. In case we have 5 developers, the total working hours is 6*5*10 =300 working hours.
This should get a match with the task breakdown estimation. So, we should confirm the availability hours of all developers before task break down.
So, here in sprint planning, we are entering the Capacity hours. Based on the hours, we are breaking down the task and determining the task that can be performed in the particular sprint.
Adding to the previous hierarchy in the Grooming Meeting it goes like this:
Idea (Issue) -> Epic -> Product->Project->Feature-> User Story->Task
- Check point
This is an optional meeting. Some teams may have delivery checkpoints such as the showcase at the end of an Agile Sprint or a planning checkpoint such as the backlog grooming session during an Agile Sprint. You could also have a more generic checkpoint with your stakeholders.
Sometimes, you might refer to checkpoints as the milestones where you will have a meeting with the client and get feedback on the work in progress.
- Daily status scrum meeting
This meeting is usually conducted daily at the end of the day, where the development team reports to the scrum master about their progress. They will mention about the tasks performed during the day and will also mention the tasks to be performed the next day. And also, discuss the road blocks/constraints if any for the next day's task.
So, every member of the team answers three questions,
- What did I do today?
- What am I going to do tomorrow?
- What blocking issues do I have that I need help from the team?
This has to be conveyed to the scrum master. They need to alert the scrum master to any roadblocks that they are not able to resolve on their own.
- Retrospective meeting
Mostly, this happens at the last day of the sprint. Here, the scrum master will discuss about the following points:
- What are the tasks that have not been completed yet?
- What are all the areas we need to improve?
- What went wrong and what went well?
- How do we want to rectify thisin upcoming sprints?
Retrospective Meeting is a helpful feedback tools between the scrum team and the scrum master to assure alignment between them on the issues that impede the team’s progress.
Burn Down Chart
In Scrum, the Burn Down Chart shows the big picture of the release's progress. It is the graphical representation of the rate at which the work is completed and how much work needs to be done. It shows how much work was left to do at the beginning of each sprint. It is useful for predicting the completion of the work.
The chart shows the total effort against the amount of work delivered each iteration. All the below points can be studied from a single Burn down chart:
- Work done at each iteration
- Remaining work that needs to be done
- Work done so far
- When you can expect to be done
Conclusion
In this article, we have seen the roles involved and the process followed in Agile Scrum methodology. Many organizations encourage teams to adopt this technology and it keeps the resources very focused and it actually results in the application growing.
Thanks for reading.