Overview of Agile Frameworks

Introduction to Scrum

3 things we wish were true:

• The customer knows what he wants
• The developers know how to build it
• Nothing will change along the way

3 things we have to live with:

• The customer discovers what he wants
• The developers discover how to build it
• Most things change along the way

Given the above reality, led to the foundation of Agile which is “The Manifesto for Agile Software Development” which was officially made public in February 2001.

Through this work, we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland worked on Scrum until 1995, when they co-presented Scrum at the OOPSLA Conference in 1995. This presentation essentially documented the learning that Ken and Jeff gained over the previous few years, and made public the first formal definition of Scrum.

The history of Scrum is described elsewhere. To honor the first places where it was tried and refined, we recognize Individual, Inc., Newspaper, Fidelity Investments, and IDX (now GE Medical).

The Scrum Guide documents Scrum as developed, evolved, and sustained for 20-plus years by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber. Other sources provide you with patterns, processes, and insights that complement the Scrum framework. These may increase productivity, value, creativity, and satisfaction with the results.

Purpose of Scrum: Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products. Scrum consists of Scrum’s roles, events, artifacts, and the rules that bind them together.

Scrum is a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while Productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.

Scrum is:

• Lightweight
• Simple to understand
• Difficult to master

Scrum is a process framework that has been used to manage work on complex products since the early 1990s. Scrum is not a process, technique, or definitive method. Rather, you can employ various processes and techniques within a framework. Scrum makes clear the relative efficacy of your product management and work techniques so that you can continuously improve the product, the team, and the working environment.

The Scrum framework consists of Scrum Teams and their associated roles, events, artifacts, and rules. Each component within the framework serves a specific purpose and is essential to Scrum’s success and usage. The rules of Scrum bind together the roles, events, and artifacts, governing the relationships and interaction between them.

Topic analysis

Scrum was initially developed for managing and developing products. Starting in the early 1990s, Scrum has been used extensively, worldwide, to:

• Research and identify viable markets, technologies, and product capabilities;
• Develop products and enhancements;
• Release products and enhancements, as frequently as many times per day;
• Develop and sustain Cloud (online, secure, on-demand) and other operational. Environments for product use; and,
• Sustain and renew products.

Scrum has been used to develop software, hardware, embedded software, networks of interacting function, autonomous vehicles, schools, government, marketing, managing the operation of organizations and almost everything we use in our daily lives, as individuals and societies. As technology, market, and environmental complexities and their interactions have rapidly increased; Scrum’s utility in dealing with complexity is proven daily.

Scrum proved especially effective in iterative and incremental knowledge transfer. Scrum is now widely used for products, services, and the management of the parent organization. The essence of Scrum is a small team of people. The individual team is highly flexible and adaptive. These strengths continue operating in single, several, many, and networks of teams that develop, release, operate and sustain the work and work products of thousands of people. They collaborate, interoperate through sophisticated development architectures, and target release environments.

Scrum is founded on empirical process control theory or empiricism. Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known. Scrum employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and control risk. Three pillars uphold every implementation of empirical process control: transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Scrum prescribes four formal events for inspection and adaptation, as described in the Scrum Events section of this document:

• Sprint Planning
• Daily Scrum
• Sprint Review
• Sprint Retrospective

When the values of commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect are embodied and lived by the Scrum Team, the Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation come to life and build trust for everyone. The Scrum Team members learn and explore those values as they work with the Scrum roles, events, and artifacts.

Successful use of Scrum depends on people becoming more proficient in living these five values. People personally commit to achieving the goals of the Scrum Team. The Scrum Team members have the courage to do the right thing and work on tough problems. Everyone focuses on the work of the Sprint and the goals of the Scrum Team. The Scrum Team and its stakeholders agree to be open about all the work and the challenges with performing the work. Scrum Team members respect each other to be capable, independent people

The Scrum Team consists of a Product Owner, the Development Team, and a Scrum Master. Scrum Teams are self-organizing and cross-functional. Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team. Cross-functional teams have all the competencies needed to accomplish the work without depending on others not part of the team. The team model in Scrum is designed to optimize flexibility, creativity, and productivity. The Scrum Team has proven itself increasingly effective for all the earlier stated uses and any complex work. Scrum Teams deliver products iteratively and incrementally, maximizing opportunities for feedback. Incremental deliveries of “Done” product ensure a potentially useful version of a working product is always available.

Scrum’s artifacts represent work or value to provide transparency and opportunities for inspection and adaptation. Artifacts defined by Scrum are specifically designed to maximize transparency of key information so that everybody has the same understanding of the artifact

Scaling Scrum:

1. Scrum of Scrums (SoS) The scrum of scrums is a technique to operate Scrum at scale, for multiple teams working on the same product, allowing them to discuss progress on their interdependencies, focusing on how to coordinate delivering software, especially on areas of overlap and integration. Depending on the cadence (timing) of the scrum of scrums, the relevant daily scrum for each scrum team ends by designating one member as an ambassador to participate in the scrum of scrums with ambassadors from other teams. Depending on the context, the ambassadors may be technical contributors or each team's scrum master
2. Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) Large-scale scrum (LeSS) is a product development framework that extends Scrum with scaling rules and guidelines without losing the original purposes of Scrum. There are two levels to the framework: the first LeSS level is designed for up to 8 teams; the second level, known as "LeSS Huge", introduces additional scaling elements for development with up to hundreds of developers. "Scaling Scrum starts with understanding and being able to adopt standard real one-team Scrum. Large-scale Scrum requires examining the purpose of single-team Scrum elements and figuring out how to reach the same purpose while staying within the constraints of the standard Scrum rules."

Bas Vodde and Craig Larman evolved the LeSS framework from their experiences working with large-scale product development, especially in the telecoms and finance industries. It evolved by taking Scrum and trying many different experiments to discover what works. In 2013, the experiments were solidified into the fewer framework rules. The intention of LeSS is to "descale" organization complexity, dissolving unnecessary complex organizational solutions, and solving them in simpler ways. Fewer roles, less management, less organizational structures

• Agility is a journey, not the destination or goal for any organization or business. (ie) Agility is a means to achieve the goal.
• Thus, enterprise(s) should focus on Being Agile Vs Doing Agile.
• Agile is a Philosophy, NOT a Process or Methodology or Framework
• “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb
• “Be the change you want to see in the world”, said Mahatma Gandhi.