Agile Testing - Part 3 - More on Scrum

SCRUM Ceremonies

Sprint Planning meeting:

 1st Part:

•        Creating Product Backlog
•        Determining the Sprint Goal.
•        Participants: Product Owner, Scrum Master, Scrum Team 

 2nd Part:

•        Participants: Scrum Master, Scrum Team
•        Creating Sprint Backlog

Daily Scrum 

Each day during the sprint, a project status meeting occurs. This is called a daily scrum, or the daily standup.

This meeting has specific guidelines: 

•  Lasts about 15 minute
•  What was achieved since the last meeting?
•  What are the impediments to your tasks?
•  What will you achieve before the next meeting?

Sprint Review meeting

•  Team presents what it accomplished during the sprint
•  Typically takes the form of a demo of new features or underlying architecture
•  Lasts for about 4 hours

Sprint Retrospective meeting

•  All team members reflect on the past sprint
•  Make continuous process improvements
•  Two main questions are asked in the sprint retrospective:

            What went well during the sprint?

            What could be improved in the next sprint? 

•  Three hour time limit

Artifacts:

Product Backlog

•   A list of all desired work on the project Usually a combination of

               story-based work
               task-based work

•   List is prioritized by the Product Owner typically a Product Manager, Marketing, Internal Customer, etc.

Sprint Backlog

               

•  A subset of Product Backlog Items, which define the work for a Sprint
•  Scrum team takes the Sprint Goal and decides what tasks are necessary
•  Team adds new tasks whenever they need to in order to meet the Sprint Goal
•  Team can remove unnecessary tasks
•   are updated whenever there’s new information

Sprint Burn down Chart     

          

•  Depicts the total Sprint Backlog hours remaining per day
•  Shows the estimated amount of time to release
•  Ideally should burn down to zero to the end of the Sprint
•  Actually is not a straight line
•  Can bump UP

Difference Between Waterfall and Scrum

Waterfall Model

• It follows a very logical path, first do a thorough study on the customer requirements and then freeze the requirements.
• Frozen Requirement Spec is then analyzed by the design team and a complete design document gets written, documented and reviewed by every stake holders.
• Design document gets translated in to the product and gets tested/verified by a group of verification engineers/customers etc.
• Once the product is released in to the market, enters in to maintenance mode.

Scrum Model

• Team takes a shorter step in a fixed iterative manner
• Team along with the Stakeholders/Customers inspects what was developed and adapts changes as needed as per customer requirements. Customer comes to know in a shorter time about the product they are waiting for. They can provide comments etc
• Scrum encourages changes – team wants customer to have the best possible product that improves/enhances lives of customers. Where as Waterfall Model discourages changes at the later stages.
• Scrum understands that good ideas can come at any time during the project. Waterfall model does not.