The Processia Agile/Scrum development method

The Scrum development method

Scrum is an iterative product and software development method. Its core objectives are to reduce the risks relative to software development, and improve productivity of the product team.

Scrum was built to focus on product development, but happened to be a great fit for software development projects, as well as maintenance projects. The Scrum approach scales well to large projects and can be applied to any context or team working towards a common goal (e.g. managing a school, doing scientific research, or planning a wedding).

Scrum is built on a few simple core processes, encapsulating a set of practices and roles.

Scrum Roles

• The “Scrum Master” is responsible for the application of the practices, and is in some aspects similar to a Project Manager
• The “Product Owner” oversees the integrity of the product’s functional content.
• The “Team” is a multidisciplinary team realizing the design, implementation, testing.

The Processia approach to the Scrum practices

Our Scrum approach relies upon the application of a few simple practices:

• Each product increment is developed during a “sprint”, which is a period of two weeks to one month. Deliveries to the customer are generally realized every two sprints.
• During a sprint, the functional content cannot change. Technical solutions can vary, though.
• The contents of a sprint is a subset of the “Product Backlog”, which is an ordered set of high level requirements

The contents of a sprint are defined during the “Sprint Planning Meeting”. During this meeting,

1. The Product Owner communicates to the team the Backlog items he wants to include into the sprint.
2. The team evaluates the effort required by the Product Owner’s demand, and commits on a scope.

Then, during a sprint, nobody can change the sprint backlog. Differently put, functional requirements are frozen for the current sprint. Actual work performed during a sprint include: validation of the technical path, realization of tests plans based on the requirements, development, tests execution, and packaging.

Once the sprint finished, the team realizes a demo of the sprint to the stakeholders, and shares the potential deliverables with them.

Benefits

The keystone of Scrum, as opposed to a waterfall approach, is the acceptance that customer requirements can change at any moment. Scrum adopts an empirical approach, accepts that no problem can be fully understood, and accepts that no upfront specification can match the actual business requirements. Instead, Scrum focuses on maximizing the productivity of the team and its agility to answer to new requirements.

Processia Solutions has been using Scrum for now more than ten years on small and large development projects, with very good results and great customer acceptance.

Scrum in your project

We typically start Scrum projects with a short audit period, which lets us analyze the situation and product a first Product Backlog. At the end of the audit, we step back to have an overview of this Product Backlog, and split it into two or more sprints.

The first sprint should at this point be thoroughly defined and planned to permit to permit a potential immediate start. However, the following sprints can remain more loosely defined, in order to give an idea of the roadmap but still keep room for re-orientation.