Agile Class Week 2: Scrum Framework

My professor started the discussion by asking what we have learned after reading our book. One of my classmates answered him. If I was the one called, I will mention these lines from chapter one of the book, Learning Agile by Andrew Stellman, Jennifer Greene, "Agile is also a mindset, because the right mindset can make a big difference in how effectively a team uses the practices. This mindset helps people on a team share information with one another, so that they can make important project decisions together—instead of having a manager who makes all of those decisions alone." Then I will explain that understanding Agile Values is important, which was part of chapter two, because it can bring the team's perspective together.

After that, we discussed about Scrum Framework Ceremonies which are sprint planning, retrospectives, and daily scrum. He also showed us how to create a roadmap, product backlog, sprint backlog, and burndown chart.

Learning and understanding a user story is, for me, the best part of the discussion. A user story is essentially a high-level definition of what the software should be capable of doing. If the user stories are vague, then your team will just use a valueless stories which will produce a valueless project output.

Next, we talked about Scrum Product Backlog which is a list of all things that needs to be done within the project. There are several ways to prioritize the requirements in the backlog. Some of the most popular ones include MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won't). Maintaining the Scrum Product Backlog is responsibility of the product owner but Team Members can add, delete or change it.

Lastly, we started working on our class project which is creating a board game while using all the things we have learned about agile methodology. We are using Trello, project management application, to save the user stories we have created. We have started our Sprint Planning by creating product backlogs. The assigned product owner explained the features of the game that we are going to build.

Source(s):

Learning Agile: Understanding Scrum, XP, Lean, and Kanban