What is Scrum?

The Scrum framework has been used since the early 1990s but many people confuse it with a technique or rather, a process. scrum is none of that. it is a framework that can be used for building products. This article focuses on discussing Scrum in detail.

What is Scrum?

Scrum is a popular framework that is used whenever we want to develop complex products, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland are known as the people who developed Scrum.

• Scrum allows us to develop products of the highest value while making sure that we maintain creativity and productivity.
• The iterative and incremental approach used in scrum allows the teams to adapt to the changing requirements.

Key Terminologies

1. Product Backlog: The product backlog is known to be the prioritized list of fixes as well as features that is included in the product’s roadmap.
2. Sprint: Sprint is known as a time-box event which typically lasts from one week to four weeks, in this phase a product increment or iteration occurs.
3. Development Team: The development team is a group of individuals who are professional in their field and are responsible for product delivery.
4. Daily Scrum: Daily scrum is a 15 minute daily meeting used by the development team to integrate activities and to create a plan for the next 24 hours of development.
5. Sprint Review: The sprint review is held at the end of the sprint in which the team presents all the work that is completed to their stakeholders and the stakeholders give back their feedback.
6. Sprint Retrospective: The sprint retrospective is a meeting concluded at the end of each sprint so that the team can discuss what went well and what could be improved as well as how to make those improvements.

Scrum Roles

Following are the various roles in the scrum, these are the most commonly known and used widely in the industry:

1. Scrum Team: Scrum team is a collection of individuals from the company (typically 6-10 people) who make sure to deliver the project requirements or increments.
2. Product Owner: The project owner represents the stakeholders and they are the ones responsible for prioritizing the backlog which ultimately leads to maximum value and team work.
3. Scrum Master: The scrum master is an important individual who serves as a guide and mentor to make sure their team understands the scrum framework and it’s values. the scrum master is highly involved dealing with day to day tasks with their team members.

Roles in scrum

Sprints in Scrum

Whenever we build projects or products we do it in series of repetitions and these repetitions are known as sprint, sprint helps the developers of the project to build projects with higher productivity and functional. sprints are just a series of steps involved in a time-frame or duration that deals with the overall development of the product.

• The sprint also allows us to adapt to the changes more faster and quickly.
• The sprint helps creators and developers to build products faster.
• The sprint is a series or cycle to break down the tasks.

Sprint Process

Step 1: The scrum cycle is a complete cycle of product development which starts with the Product Owner, the product owner defines all the product backlog and requirements for further development.

Step 2: The next step is handled by the scrum team and the scrum team manages the Sprint Planning in the sprint planning phase the team plans all the tasks and roles for the development of the product.

Step 3: Then in the next phase the team deals with the sprint backlogs which are due and deals accordingly with all the backlogs left.

Step 4: As we know the scrum master is someone who overseas all the tasks of the team and acts as a mentor for the team, so in this step the scrum master overseas and collaborates with the team to make sure the product is ready on time, this cycle typically lasts from 1 to 4 weeks but depending on the project size it varies a lot, which is why sometimes for larger projects, it’s also divided into smaller part known as Daily Scrum.

Step 5: This is the final process stage, in this stage the team integrates all the modules of the project and tests the various components of the product.

Below is the visual representation of the Scrum’s sprint process:

Scrum Sprint Cycle

Applications of Scrum

So far we have understood that scrum is a popular agile framework which is popularly used these days in project management as well as software development we use the scrum framework because it provides us with a flexibility and an iterative approach to do product development and whenever we do product or software development.

The scrum framework allows us to respond with the teams quickly when we have changing requirements which helps us in delivering values incrementally let’s understand some common applications of scrum:

1. Software Development

The scrum framework is popularly used in the software development field in order to manage and lever deliver software projects of small sizes as well as large and complex projects.

We use scrum framework because it allows us to collaborate with the development team in order to work with short iterations as we have discussed before these short iterations are called sprints which lasts from two to four weeks at the end of each sprint we get a potential product.

2. Scrum in Marketing

The scrum framework can also be used in the marketing in order to manage and execute various campaigns we can use the scrum because it enables marketing professionals so that they can respond quickly to the changes of the market and according to those changes they can test different strategies and then optimise their campaigns more efficiently.

3. Social & Non Profit Sector

This framework can also be applied in the social sector as well as the non profit organization’s industry to manage various projects efficiently as it allows these organisations to be more adaptive and to be more responsive to the various needs of the community that they serve which can lead to overall growth.

4. Any Complex Project

No matter what sector we are working on the scrum is suitable for any project that deals with complex requirements which are changing with time because when we are working with the product that has changing requirements then using an incremental approach is always beneficial.

5. R&D (Research and Development Sector)

The scrum framework is useful in under industries where we have the work of research and development as we can use the scrum framework to manage ongoing projects and prioritise them accordingly as we manage and prioritise various products and projects it will allow the team of development and researchers to experiment and adapt various approach based on feedback that they receive regularly.

Benefits of Scrum

Now that we have seen the applications of scrum let’s move on to discussing the benefits of the scrum framework, If the scrum framework is implemented in the right way it can offer numerous benefits for the organisations as well as the teams who are involved in the project management or product development let’s see some key advantages of using the scrum framework:

1. Faster Development

As we know that faster development is a crucial aspect of any project management scrum is used in order to achieve rapid development cycles there are several ways in which scrum helps us to achieve faster development some of which are iterative and incremental development, regular release cycles, prioritising the features and quick adaptation to various changes made.

Apart from that scrum also provides us with the facility to receive feedbacks through various ceremonies such as sprint review these rapid feedbacks allows the development team in order to identify and and solve the issue faster.

2. Transparency in all Stages

In the scrum framework the transparency is a fundamental principle which enables clear communication at all the stages of a project being developed this transparency helps everyone such as the teams stakeholders as well as the organisations to understand the challenges progress as well as the outcome of their work in a scrum framework transparency is handled using various techniques such as product backlog sprint backlog sprint review daily standup meetings etc.

3. Time-efficient

Scrum framework is also known for its focus on the time efficiency because it uses the iterative development it allows for short cycles known as sprints which allows continuous improvement the scrum framework allows us to use several practises or principles which contribute to make sure that the projects we are making are more time efficient scrum handles time management through

• incremental development
• clear roles and responsibilities
• daily standup meetings
• prioritisation and regular releases

Apart from that it also uses a concept of time boxed meetings in which various ceremonies such as the sprint planning, daily standup sprint review are time boxed meaning that they have a certain limit of time to finish these meetings the time boxing method allows us to do task in less time which ultimately leads to efficiency of time.

4. Budget-friendly Planning

The budgeting is an important role in the project management In order for us to maximise the revenue of the company we have to make sure that whatever product or project we are building is budget friendly the scrum framework allows us to manage products within our budget because it follows various principles that helps us to prioritise the important factors of the project and it also allows us to reduce the wastage through following the incremental approach while dealing with new features.

Limitations of Scrum

As any other framework used in the product development the scrum also has some limitations in it as we have discussed applications and the advantages of using the scrum framework we also have to take into consideration of the limitations of this framework here are some common limitations of the scrum framework:

1. Not Suitable for All Projects

The scrum framework will be best suited for projects which have challenging requirements but a high uncertainty if we have a project that is well defined and have stable requirements which will mean that once the project is ongoing, there is not much changes to be made in the requirements, Then it is advisable to use some other project management framework.

As the scrum framework is more suited when the project has high uncertainty and the requirements are constantly changing so while dealing with a project that requires a strict and detailed plan then we can say that the scrum framework is not very well suited.

2. Requires Skilled & Experienced Team

The scrum framework is only successfully implemented if the skill and experience of the people working on the project are high, the experience of the scrum team the product owner, scrum master and the development team makes a very big impact on the implementation of the scrum model.

If we have any experience team and we implement the scrum model then the team may have struggle to fully understand the scrum principles and apply it which will lead to inefficiencies in the product development.

3. Limited Predictability

The scrum framework or model has an adaptive nature which focuses on the changing requirements which makes it less predictable which can be limitation for some organisations because some organisations may require strict predictability of the project timeline as well as the outcome for example some industries have regulatory compliance in which the use of scrum framework Is not possible.

4. Lack of Detailed Documentation

The scrum model does not have a lot of documentation Which makes the development more time efficient as there is less time required for the documentation work but having less documentation can be challenging because in some industries it is required to have large amount of documentation such as for some pharmacies it is required to have extensive documentation in order to manage regulatory compliance so it can be a challenge to use the scrum model in such cases because this model does not provide large amount of documentation of the project.

5. Risk of Team Burnout

As the scrum allows for continuous improvement using the iterative approach and allows for adaptability it can also create some pressure on scrum teams as we know it uses sprints cycles to meet the demands and deliver the request faster which may lead to burnout if the teams are not sufficient or if there is some lack of work life balance in the team, which can ultimately become disadvantage in the long run.

Conclusion: Scrum

In conclusion, the scrum provides us a methodology to deal with the product development cycle and also provides us all the necessary guidelines to deal with the day to day tasks and also provides us with the opportunity to make sure to develop projects with higher functionality in lesser time and efforts. The scrum methodology is used in various software industrial development process and provides us a better way to understand the projects and build the project with more efficiency.