Based on industry survey, the majority of Agile practitioners practice either Scrum, a combination of Scrum and XP, or a hybrid nature of Scrum to match team requirements. Scrum is a time-boxed iterative and incremental framework for Agile development process. It consists of teams, roles, events, artifacts, and rules. Let us understand each role and common artifacts in brief first.
The typical roles in a Scrum team are:
Product owner: A product owner manages the product backlog in a prioritized form to deliver the best business value, thus grooming backlog items and helping teams with requirements and clarifications.
Development team: A development team consists of self-organizing cross functional individuals (developers) working as team, who do the work in increments to deliver potentially shippable products.
Scrum master: A Scrum master runs the Scrum team to make sure that Scrum theory, practices, and rules are implemented, and it works closely with the product owner, the development team, and the organization too.
Based on hybrid Scrum process, different teams also have dedicated roles for Architect and Project Manager in the team to meet specific team requirements.
Sprint: A time-boxed period of nearly one month or less to deliver potentially shippable product increment based on prioritized backlog items committed by the team.
Sprint planning meeting: In this, the team commits on what can be delivered from prioritized backlog items and how it will be achieved.
Daily Scrum: A time-boxed daily stand-up meeting in which each team member explains what has been achieved since last meeting, what will be done before next meeting, and impediments, if any.
Sprint review: In this, the team demonstrates the Sprint work and gathers feedback. It is a bi-directional communication platform for the team and stakeholders on functionality delivered in a Sprint.
Sprint retrospective: An opportunity for the team to introspect what went well, what needs improvement, and action items for the selected improvements.
Depending on the nature of hybrid Scrum process and team dynamics, the variations of the Scrum events, like local daily Scrum and distributed daily Scrum, are also used by various teams. Similarly, the planning and estimations process events are executed that matches best to the Scrum team requirements.
The common Scrum artifacts are:
Product backlog: AN ordered list of requirements that is required in the product. It can be anything like requirements, features, enhancements, bugs, and so on.
Sprint backlog: This consists of selected and ranked product backlog items planned to be delivered in a Sprint.
Increment: Consists of delivered product backlog items in all earlier Sprints/Releases, and are very much usable as part of existing potentially shippable product.