Showing posts with label Scrum planning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scrum planning. Show all posts

Thursday 20 February 2014

The True Explanation of How Scrum Iterations Or Sprints Can Help To Support And Incorporate Dynamic Changing Environments

Scrum and iterative development
Scrum framework actively supports project development in the form of iterations, known popularly as “iterative development” in technical jargon. Scrum supports iterative development in the form of sprints. The feature helps to control the return over investment or the “ROI” in a much better manner, and helps the stakeholders to decide and prioritize the development activity as well as production processes. Scrum is all about incorporating dynamic changes during project development, and promotes the primary goal of delivering maximum business value within a limited or minimum time scale. It is possible to achieve dynamic development processes by properly implementing scrum and controlling the sprint activity in an efficient manner.

Importance of sprint activity, or iterations, in catering to constantly changing project environments
Projects can be complex. They can also be subjected to ongoing market trends and changing user- associated requirements. While developing very big or complex projects, it can be difficult to assign fixed goals or objectives. Development takes time. More than often, the functionalists or facilities linked up with a particular project may become obsolete or redundant over time. This can create problems with the development activity if the organization is following traditional waterfall or linear development methodologies. It becomes very difficult to incorporate the changes in such methods since the entire project has to be initiated right from the beginning – from scratch. This result is a significant loss of working hours and productivity. This is where scrum comes in. Scrum framework supports changes occurring in the project environment in a dynamic manner. It is also possible to consistently evaluate the development related requirements, and make amendments in the project development plan in an instant, without any significant loss of time or resources. Moreover, it is much easier to identify redundancy levels and put a curb on nonproductive developmental activities – simply because the sprint process incorporates dynamic updates within the product backlog as and when required. The product owner can update, remove, and add user stories or requirements in the product backlog, and the same can be taken up for development purposes in the sprint backlog. This is the main essence of scrum, and the primary reason why scrum is so popular as a development methodology.

How can you dynamically incorporate changes into your ongoing project or production plan?
Scrum planning and implementation starts with the creation of the product backlog – the list of requirements needed to develop the project in totality. In a typical project, the end product is segregated into its basic constituent parts called user stories. The product owner represents the interests of the stakeholders, and is therefore responsible for creating the product backlog.

During the implementation process, the product owner determines the priority of the importance of user stories and transfers them to the sprint backlog for development purpose. Team members take up user stories on the basis of their levels of expertise and start developing them during the sprint. After the end of each sprint, user stories are checked for acceptance levels. If they are found to be acceptable i.e. “shippable” they are accepted as “Done”. In case the development remains unfinished, the incomplete user stories still go back to the product backlog, where the product owner reevaluates their importance and priority, and eventually decides whether to send the incomplete stories back to the sprint backlog for further development, or to mark them as redundant and do away with them. This is how scrum helps to check undue wastage of development time and resources, since the requirement is evaluated every time the sprint cycle ends. If the particular development is found to be non-productive, they are simply taken away from the sprint backlog.

On the other hand, if the owners or the stakeholders feel a new functionality or facility might increase the market value of the ongoing project, the new set of requirements can be easily added as user stories in the product backlog, and the product owner can simply include them in the sprint backlog for development purposes.  This is how scrum can dynamically incorporate changes in an ongoing project.


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