What Is Scrum Methodology? Benefits, Usage & Various Roles

It is essential to understand the project development methodologies. A project development methodology holds a particular approach and some sequence of steps and exercises for each stage of the project’s life cycle. In this article, you will learn about what is scrum and what is scrum methodology.

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What is Scrum?

Scrum is one framework that uses these methodologies. Following this framework, developers can address complex adaptive problems iteratively and incrementally. Scrum is a versatile, rapid, flexible, and effective agile framework designed to deliver content to the customer throughout the project development process. It is the most popular product development strategy. Scrum is a part of the agile software development methodology mostly used for software development projects. 

Scrum essentially influences the agile development approaches and articulates a set of values to develop higher-quality software rapidly. The term scrum got its name from the sport called rugby, where scrum is a player formation where every player plays a specific role towards a particular and rapid adoption of the strategy. Scrum follows the same pattern of development.

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Read: Difference Between Agile & Scrum

History of Scrum

Now, since you have understood what scrum is, let us now take a look at how it came into existence. Scrum methodology started back in the early 90s. In 1995, at the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) conference in Austin, Texas, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber came up with a process of software development.

They have published a paper in which they have formalized the methodology SCRUM Software Development Process. This paper talks about enhancing performance in developing new, hybrid software projects with a self-organizing team and modular tasks. 

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Events in Scrum

In the scrum methodology, certain events, sometimes called ceremonies, occur inside each sprint to enable efficient work where the team collaborates closely and effectively toward positive outcomes. 

• Sprint Planning

The first step is planning what, how and why something needs to be a part of and completed during a sprint. The sprint planning meeting is held during the start of each sprint to determine how a project will approach the deadlines and stages of the Project Backlog. The features and tasks of each sprint differ and are defined during this stage.

• Daily Scrum

Evaluating the trends and progress of the sprint is the main goal of the Daily Scrum. The progress is monitored until the very end of the sprint. A small meeting takes place every morning during the sprint to synchronize each activity and formulate a plan for the upcoming twenty-four hours. It helps the team answer questions related to their daily tasks, ask for help if required and resolve any issues. 

• Sprint Review

After a sprint, the team reviews the sprint to identify work completed while referring to the product backlog. For Scrum in software engineering, once a sprint is complete, the advancement of progress for a product should be clearly visible.

• Sprint Retrospective

During the review, the team inspects the completed goals and notes the good and the bad to ensure mistakes are not repeated. The team identifies possible improvements in the development process and plans for their implementation in the next sprint.

What is Sprint Planning?

Before diving into the sprint, the team needs to plan out the why, what and how of the sprint to ensure all factors are considered, and the sprint is a success. Sprint planning is important in the Scrum framework and is usually timebound, with 2 hours allotted for every week of the sprint’s total duration.

• Why 

The Product Owner communicates what can be improved, and the goals for the sprint are established through the collaboration of the Product Owner, Scrum Master, Scrum Developer and the team to understand why the sprint is valuable and necessary.

• What 

The Product Owner selects items from the Product Backlog to incorporate into the current sprint. The team looks at their past performance, current capacity, the definition of done, and so on to decide how much will be completed within this sprint.

• How 

The Developer establishes work that needs to be completed for every Product Backlog item selected to create an increment that aligns with the definition of done. The Product Backlog items are segmented into smaller tasks of a day or less. 

The Sprint Backlog is established based on the sprint goal, selected Product Backlog items, and the Sprint Plan.

Metadata Description

Scrum is an evolved methodology of the agile software development process. Scrum methodology depends on a set of defined practices and roles that are intended exclusively for the software development process. Scrum methodology emphasizes accountability with iterative progress towards a well-defined software development goal. Scrum is a widely used agile software development methodology for teams.

Scrum Methodology

Scrum is an evolved methodology of the agile software development process. Scrum methodology depends on a set of defined practices and roles that are intended exclusively for the software development process. 

Scrum methodology emphasizes accountability with iterative progress towards a well-defined software development goal. Scrum methodology primarily incorporates the intention of achieving new software capability and objectives every 2 to 4 weeks.

Read: Scrum Master Salary in India

Who uses the Scrum Methodology?

Scrum is a widely used agile software development methodology for teams. As per the 12th annual State of Agile report, almost 70 percent of software development teams practice Scrum methodology or Scrum hybrid techniques to complete a software development project. 

Slowly, with the increase of its potential and popularity, scrum has spread its utility to other sectors like business, IT, and marketing. According to scrum, every project must go on an agile process to move forward with complexity and ambiguity. Even the leadership group of any business organization or enterprise also depends on the scrum’s agile practices. By providing delivery of projects with added functionality iteratively, management can progress quickly in executing projects in modules.

How scrum fits into agile project management?

Scrum is a component of agile methodology but not absolutely the only part. You can consider agile being a big tent where scrum is a strong pillar.

• Agile is a set of principles where a group’s progress or a team is measured every day. Scrum produces a means to utilize agile in a software development project.
• Scrum follows the principles and values of agile, but the specifications, definitions, and software development practices differ.

Benefits of Scrum Methodology

Scrum methodology has various gains over general agile methods. It has become the most aided reference framework for software development. Some popularly known benefits of scrum are:

Yielding of expectations

Scrum methodology brings an expectation by providing indication and value outcome that each iteration or history of the project delivers. It also helps the team establish some information about the product and the owner’s priority.

Highly Scalable

The different processes within the Scrum methodology follows an iterative approach and have distinct work periods to handle. That makes the whole team focus on particular functionalities with a specific period. It boosts the development process to achieve better deliverables and allows the team to scale the modules in terms of priority and functionality.

Lesser preparation time

Software developers can start developing the essential functionalities first and update the modules on further iterations so that the client can start using the most. Also, this brings the product in a working condition to utilize its functional modules.

Flexibility in alteration

 There are situations in a software development phase where the clients expect frequent changes or up-gradation. A quick reaction for altering the modules as per market requirements is possible to adapt through the scrum methodology.

Better software quality

 It is essential to have quality software and the need to achieve a working version of it after each iteration. The scrum methodology of software development helps in achieving this.

Prediction of delivery

 Using scrum methodology, measuring the average development speed the team is having in the sprint becomes easier. The software’s functionalities are developed in chunks, and hence, estimating the rate of flow of work becomes easy. At every iteration, the Scrum team can calculate the backlog of tasks.

Reduced risk factors

 In scrum methodology, due to the plan of carrying and implementing the most valuable functionalities in the initial stage, knowing the speed and capability of the team makes it easy to clear the risk of late delivery.

Different Roles in a Scrum team

Here is the list of the three most significant roles in a scrum team:

1. Scrum master

This is the person who is responsible for leading the software development team with scrum methodology. The scrum master handles the compression of difficulties in the software development project and serves the Product Owner’s responsibility for efficiently maximizing the return of investment.

2. Product owner (PO)

This person represents the customer or stakeholders of that software, and he works actively with the Scrum master to successfully launch the product in the market.

3. The team

They are a group of professionals with the necessary technical knowledge to develop the project and jointly make it successful.

Conclusion

Hence, Scrum is the most widely used software development and project management framework for managing different software development processes and stages. Its incremental, iterative, and fast product deployment feature is popular among all other agile product development methodologies.

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