Scrum Basics- Roles and Keywords

Scrum is a framework that describe roles, tools and set of meetings that work together to built team structure. Scrum allows teams to work in a self-organized environment, where they can analyze their loses and wins to move towards continuous improvement.

Roles In a Scrum

There are three roles in a sprint. These roles describe the key responsibilities of those on scrum team. The existing job titles on your team can take-up these responsibilities. Remember the essence of scrum is to help teams self manage and enable them for continuous improvement.

There are three roles in a scrum team:

1. Development team: This is often confused with a team of coders but its not always that. Development team in scrum is the people who do the work. It can be graphic designers, Content writers, Marketing peoples, Salesperson, etc. It depends on what team is adapting scrum and work do they do. The team is required to provide complete transparency of work in daily scrum meetings and deliver tasks through the sprint.
2. Product Owner: The scrum team as stated is built to be flexible and responsive, so its product owners responsibility to prioritize things. The product owner has to understand what customer wants, what value is being delivered to customer and also balancing the needs of stakeholders. The product owner has to make sure that there are no vague requirements or conflicting priorities.
3. Scrum Master: The scrum master is the person that holds it all together. He helps the product owner in better understanding, prioritizing, planning and breaking work down for the team. The scrum master helps the development team by removing conflicts and manage blockers. The scrum master also helps the organization at understanding and adapting scrum.

Keywords for Scrum:

There are many terminologies used as part of scrum environment but knowing these basics will help you a lot.

1. Sprint: A sprint is a period of time during which the scrum team delivers a useable, potentially released increment of a project. The time period can vary from team to team, it can be one week , 15 days, one month etc.
2. Sprint Planning: It is a period of time that is allocated to the scrum team. In this time period, the team looks at the product backlog and evaluates what needs to be done at priority. The team then brings that work into sprint backlog.
3. Sprint Goal: It is the short term goal that is being served in that sprint. It contains the problem that is being solved in the sprint.
4. Sprint Retrospective: This is a scrum event that takes place after the sprint has ended. Here all team members sit together , enjoy their wins and identify their losses, so that proactive measures can be taken and the team’s performance can improved in future sprints. Ideally whole team should be included in this.
5. Sprint Review: This is a scrum event that takes place right after the sprint ends. Here the team sits with stakeholders to discuss the value that the sprint has added to project. It is seen that where the project stands with its current status and project goals
6. Sprint Spillover: It is a sprint item that has failed to meet its defined criteria at the end of the sprint. You may keep in mind that during sprint planning some of the criteria may be decided by team as not applicable and it should be analyzed accordingly.
7. Sprint Velocity: It is the amount of work a team has done in previous sprint. This is calculated by taking average of story points of all items done in a sprint. It is used to estimate amount of work that team can do in future sprints.
8. Sprint Capacity: This is the work capacity of team in a sprint. It is the availability of a team for a sprint.
9. Sprint Burndown: This is visual representation of amount of work that is left in the product backlog. The chat for this is built with time on x-axis and work left on y-axis. Through time as more work is completed, the line for this chart may fall.
10. Sprint Burnup: This is visual representation of amount of work that has been completed. The chat for this is built with time on x-axis and work done on y-axis. Through time as more work is completed, the line for this chart may raise.
11. Sprint Backlog: This is a part of product backlog that team aims to deliver within the time period of the sprint.
12. Scrum Daily Standup: Sprint is a Scrum event that occurs everyday of the sprint. Its goal is to provide visibility of progress to team and to resolve any conflicts.
13. Sprint Zero: It is the time used to adapt scrum methodologies to the project. There is a conflict as if sprint zero occurs or not. Some say that it only occurs the first time scrum is being adapted.
14. Buffer: It is a time cushion that is calculated for sprints. It comes in handy when a sprint interruption occurs.
15. Buffer Penetration: This is buffer tracking and is used to make decision about the use of buffer.
16. Blockers: These are the things that become show stoppers for the team during sprint. They can also be the factors that slow down the performance of the team.
17. Stakeholders: It is a person outside of scrum team that has interest in and knowledge of project.
18. Product Backlog: It is the list of items that need to be done so that the project goal can be achieved. These items or their priorities can change as the project increments ahead.

Well that's it for now. Do let me know if I missed some important keywords or definitions.