Understanding The Scrum Journey

Scrum is derived from Agile philosophy and has become a popular execution process in the industry. The iterative software development approach for small self-sufficient teams enables them to achieve an understandably defined goal/functionality in short time frames (varying from one week to four weeks). Continuous assessment helps in refining the quality.

A team must pass through various stages to introduce and inculcate scrum. The journey transforms a team from a beginner to an expert who can in turn elevate the organizational goals and boost customer confidence. Each scrum journey is divided into different phases. Let’s try to understand each phase of the scrum journey.

Start-up Phase

Focus on the aspects that will make scrum rollout a lot easier to manage.

• Understand customer expectations on scrum execution.
• Gather information on customer requirements for deliverables, quality parameters, tracking monitoring, and progress.
• Share details with the team to manage client centricity and align to the impact that will be created by the execution.

Learning Phase

Introduce the team to the Agile methodology through online or classroom or On Job training. This phase helps the team to develop a thought process transition needed for the scrum execution. To start with:

• Team/s are formed based on technology. This makes the team/s self-organized to accomplish the work.
• Identify focused, certified product owners and scrum masters who can guide and support the team by passing on regular updates to the relevant stakeholders and ensuring to gain maximum value from the process.
• Define crystal clear roles and responsibilities of the product owner, scrum master, and dev team so that they can collaborate and work together toward a common goal.
• Team to be clear on –

• • Each member of the team needs to have a complete awareness of their role.
  • At the same time, there needs to be a clear understanding of each other’s roles.

Fig. 2 depicts the visual effects of the scrum framework that include the team, roles, events, output, and improvements needed.

 Scrum Introduction

Growth Phase

This is the most important phase for the team. The team implements all the learnings acquired so far. The implementation and transition may be tricky as you need to handle maintenance and support of the legacy solution along with the new feature development and/or enhancement. The team learns to deal with the existing software developed using a non-agile methodology based on a legacy technology stack. The team to follow the aspects while adopting scrum as mentioned below:

• Tools usage to capture user stories, activity tracking along with monitoring, and generating a report to view progress.
• Conducting scrum events diligently can assist the team to gain utmost efficiency with minimum hindrance caused due to reprioritization of the planned activities.
• Creating opportunities for the team to analyze, learn, and improve from the shortcomings.
• Preparing to handle the challenges associated with dealing with multiple scrum teams, and even geographically distributed teams.
• Achieving on-time product releases, maintaining product quality, leading to customer satisfaction.
• Measuring team progress and performance by defining metrics and conducting various surveys.

With the help of the workflow tools and automation, we enhanced the “built-in quality” in the software, allowing it to focus on achieving functional completion for a Minimally Viable Product (MVP), which is the main goal at this stage of execution.

Continuous Improvement

The dev team now has achieved considerable experience in the Agile scrum framework and execution. This phase brings in developing expertise by managing the organization’s and the client’s expectations. Defining and maintaining the benchmark of the team’s performance, and providing value addition to contribute to the client’s business growth. The team marches toward this thought by:

• Building expertise in the technology by proposing ideas and/or features in the customer’s product.
• Tactical and channelized planning of the product roadmap.
• Identify ways of enhancing product performance from the lessons learned while performing retrospection.
• Go one level down in measuring team’s productivity and consistency to surface up hidden issues in the Growth phase.
• Implementing Continuous Development (CD) and Continuous Integration (CI) activities.
• Schedule regular cadence with the customer to –
  • Discuss scheduled release roadmap.
  • Understand customer product roadmap.
  • Raise dependency, risk, and mitigation plan.

Conclusion

Scrum helps iteratively and incrementally in building the product. It eliminates the chances of the architecture issues surfacing at a later stage, usually faced in the traditional execution model. Builds the team in terms of self-organization and collaboration. It constructs the team in a way to handle and manage ad-hoc customer requests.

eInfochips – an Arrow company has inculcated the project execution methodology of Agile Scrum, widely used in the industry for more than 15 years. Adopting Agile Scrum for many customer projects, eInfochips has reached a new height of execution that helps in gaining customer trust. To know more about our services, please contact us today.