I recently created a Scrum outline that some may find helpful. Enjoy:
Listed below is an outline for Scrum. This is meant to be used as a guide, the Scrum team is free to adjust and implement based upon team needs. The guiding ideas of the Agile Manifesto and 12 Agile principles should be followed when creating specifics for the Scrum team. Note that you can download the word version of this document here.
- Roles
- Scrum Team
- Performs the work
- Creates their own tasks
- Pulls stories from the Product Backlog
- Owns the sprint backlog
- Provides estimates and commitments
- Performs the work
- Product Owner
- Accountable for the product
- Owns the Product Backlog
- Prioritizes the Product Backlog
- Provides goals and vision
- Product Owner determines when to release
- Accountable for the product
- Scrum Master
- Enforces process
- Prevents and remove impediments
- Tracks metrics
- Facilitates Daily Scrum
- Enforces process
- Scrum Board
- Sections for:
- Work waiting to be picked up
- Work in progress
- Work ready for review
- Work that is DONE
- Work waiting to be picked up
- Sprint burn down chart
- Project burn down chart
- List of impediments
- High visible in a public area
- Daily Scrum revolves around Scrum board
- Team interacts with Scrum board during Daily Scrum
- Product
- Product Backlog
- List of all features/PBI/user stories for the product
- Can also contain bugs, technical pieces, and spikes
- Owned, maintained and prioritized by the product owner, thought team members can add items to the Product Backlog
- List of all features/PBI/user stories for the product
- Sprint Backlog
- Prioritized list of features the team is developing during the iteration
- Sprint Backlog created by the team
- Items in Sprint Backlog pulled based on priority from the Product Backlog
- Represents the work that the team has committed to complete for the Sprint
- Items in Sprint Backlog pulled based on priority from the Product Backlog
- Prioritized list of features the team is developing during the iteration
- Roadmap
- Mapping of all Product Backlog item to a "timeline". This can be done by month, sprint, release, quarter, etc
- Product Owner provides the Roadmap content and prioritization, the Team provides the estimation
- Mapping of all Product Backlog item to a "timeline". This can be done by month, sprint, release, quarter, etc
- Release
- Product Owner determines release
- A regular recurring release cycle is recommended
- Product Owner determines release
- Meetings
- Daily Scrum
- 15 minutes max
- Each team member states:
- What I did since last Daily Scrum
- What I plan on doing today
- My impediments
- My work that needs to be reviewed
- What I did since last Daily Scrum
- 15 minutes max
- Sprint Backlog Planning
- Product owner presents top priority items from the Product Backlog that are candidates for the upcoming Sprint
- Team uses planning poker to estimate each user story/item
- Stories that cannot be estimated upon can be converted to Spikes
- Team commits to a set of user stories/items for the Sprint
- Stories are either rank ordered or marked as high, medium, low (and optionally stretch) priority
- These items become the Sprint backlog
- Product owner presents top priority items from the Product Backlog that are candidates for the upcoming Sprint
- Sprint Task Planning
- The team reviews each story and decomposes it into tasks
- Hours (Optional)
- Team provides estimated hours for tasks (optional)
- Team capacity should be # of available hours (should be a number less than 8 per resource, something between 4~6) and number of resources
- Take into account holidays, hours, and misc outages
- Take into account unplanned work
- Team provides estimated hours for tasks (optional)
- Generally, work is pulled real time and not assigned during task planning
- The team reviews each story and decomposes it into tasks
- Sprint Closeout / Review
- The team along, with the PO and Scrum Master, review the user stories/tasks/spikes
- Ensure each is done, a story is either done or not done
- Story done-ness is defined by the story acceptance criteria, not all tasks for a story need be completed for the story to be done
- Collect total story points completed (optionally actual hours as well)
- Note actual velocity and completion percentage
- The team along, with the PO and Scrum Master, review the user stories/tasks/spikes
- Sprint Retrospectives
- Team reviews the process and discusses the things that have been working well and potential areas of improvement
- The Scrum Master and Scrum Team create and update the process norms for the team
- Team reviews the process and discusses the things that have been working well and potential areas of improvement
- Meetings Techniques
- Meetings should have a clearly stated goal or desired result
- Meetings should be timeboxed
- A parking lot can be used to hold ideas that or of note, but not directly related to the meeting goals or desired outcomes
- Meetings should have a clearly stated goal or desired result
- Estimation & Metrics
- Epics - a high level idea or theme that is comprised of user stories.
- User Stories
- Features that the team can estimated and decomposed into tasks
- Ideally in the form of "As a {user}, I want {feature} so that {value}."
- Each story has an acceptance criteria so that we know when the story is done
- Features that the team can estimated and decomposed into tasks
- Tasks
- Team decomposes user stories are decomposed into tasks
- Tasks are not assigned, rather they are pulled real time
- Team can provide hours estimates at the task level (optional)
- Team decomposes user stories are decomposed into tasks
- Spikes
- An allocation of time the team uses to investigate unknowns, research potential solutions, or addresses issues that are not stories or bugs
- A spike should have a goal
- At the end of the timebox, the team should be closer to addressing the goal of the spike
- An allocation of time the team uses to investigate unknowns, research potential solutions, or addresses issues that are not stories or bugs
- Planning Poker
- Each team member provides estimates for user stories based upon a modified Fibonacci series
- As long as the team members are close in estimates, the team can proceed to the next user story
- If there is an inability to provide estimates or estimates differ by several orders of magnitude, then further discussions should occur for the story
- Each team member provides estimates for user stories based upon a modified Fibonacci series
- Story Points
- Story points are measure of the complexity of a story relative to previous stories
- This factors in both the amount of time it takes for the story and the difficulty of the story
- Story points are measure of the complexity of a story relative to previous stories
- Velocity
- Planned velocity is the total number of story points that the team has committed for the iteration
- Actual velocity is the total number of story points that the team completed for the iteration
- Percentage completion is the actual velocity divided by the planned velocity
- Planned velocity is the total number of story points that the team has committed for the iteration
- Unplanned work – Unplanned work should be tracked. This can later be referenced in process improvement discussions.
- Epics - a high level idea or theme that is comprised of user stories.
- Engineering
- Continuous Integration - Critical for the rapid pace of Agile development
- Automated testing – automate testing as much as possible to help build quality into the process
- Continuous Integration - Critical for the rapid pace of Agile development