Wednesday, 17 September 2014

How does Scrum help in clearing Technical debt and improve Employee satisfaction in the organization?

Unlike a large amount of certifications such as ITIL certification, Prince2 certification and PMP certification, which are used for successful implementation of Best Practices or procedures for ensuring perfect design or output of a product or service, Scrum training also emphasizes on the satisfaction of employees and reduction in Technical Debt.
Technical debt is considered as a difficult challenge as considered by the older techniques of project management. This is because development of a particular product or service, testing and proper documentation will be done in sequences and at various times by different persons – in short, a single person would not be responsible for any specific Working Deliverables. The output will be that technical debt gets accumulated, in the long run, that will lead to high maintenance costs, integration and costs in release of products during the last stages of a product’s release. In other words, these cost changes are very high in these types of circumstances and problems rise in final stages of the project. Scrum certification framework averts these issues that are related to technical debt. This will be done  to ensure that Done deliverables with Acceptance criteria will be defined as one of the parts of Sprint Backlog that include key tasks involving development, testing and documentation. But this will be done as part of the same Sprint and will be carried out by the same Scrum certified or Team which will be responsible for the project.
Consistent pace throughout the project is considered as one of the main advantages of Scrum certification. A regular pace will lead to improvement of employee satisfaction, conducive environment and high level of accuracy in estimation. For development of a high quality product and for maintaining an environment, it is important that integration-type activities are carried out regularly than specify delays of the integration work till the last stage in similar type of circumstances. In order to deliver value at regular intervals, the Scrum certified team should constantly involve in development, testing and integration of the functionalities of every Prioritized Product Backlog Item (PBI) in each Sprint with the use of techniques, such as constant integration and automated testing of products. One of the major principles of Scrum certification projects is that it emphasizes on ensuring that the effort involved in the current Sprint should be similar to the future Sprints in order to maintain the consistency. This will help the team for avoiding phases of large amounts of work in a single phase as they will always have the knowledge of the levels of work that are required to complete the work in given amount of time.

 To know more click on: http://www.scrumstudy.com/blog/

Thursday, 4 September 2014

Iterative Development in Scrum

Iterative Development is one of the most important Principles in Scrum and is one of the main concepts to better Return on Investment (RoI). The Scrum framework is driven by the goal of delivering maximum business value in a minimum time span. To achieve this practically, Scrum believes in Iterative Development of Deliverables.
In most complex projects, the customer may not be able to define very concrete requirements or is not confident of what the end product may look like. For example if a customer wants an Online Grocery Sales Website then he/she may not be able to define the exhaustive list of requirements initially. After a few modules are ready the customer may get a better idea of what additional features are required.
The iterative model is more flexible in ensuring that any change requested by the customer can be included as part of the project. User Stories may have to be written constantly throughout the duration of the project. In the initial stages of writing, most User Stories are high-level functionalities. These User Stories are known as Epic(s). Epic(s) are usually too large for teams to complete in a single Sprint. Therefore, they are broken down into smaller User Stories.
Each complex aspect of the project is broken down through progressive elaboration during theGroom Prioritized Product Backlog process. The Create User Stories and the Estimate, Approve, and Commit User Stories processes are used to add new requirements to the Prioritized Product Backlog. The Product Owner’s task is to ensure increased ROI by focusing on value and its continuous delivery with each Sprint. The Product Owner should have a very good understanding of the project’s business justification and the value the project is supposed to deliver as he drafts the Prioritized Product Backlog and thereby decides what deliverables and hence values are delivered in each Sprint. Then the Create Tasks, Estimate Tasks, and Create Sprint Backlog processes produce the Sprint Backlog which the team uses to create the deliverables.
In each Sprint, the Create Deliverables process is used to develop the Sprint’s outputs. The Scrum Master has to ensure that the Scrum processes are followed and facilitates the team to work in the most productive manner possible. The Scrum Team self-organizes and aims to create the Sprint Deliverables from the User Stories in the Sprint Backlog. In large projects, various cross-functional teams work in parallel across Sprints, delivering potentially shippable solutions at the end of each Sprint. After the Sprint is complete, The Product Owner accepts or rejects the deliverables based on the Acceptance Criteria in the Demonstrate and Validate Sprint process.