https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=XU0llRltyFM

Hi. This is me.

My name is Hamid Shojaee, and I've been involved with a number of software development projects over the years, at a
number of different companies, and I've come to recognize 'Scrum,' as one of the best agile development practices in
use today.

In this fast-paced video, I want to show you why Scrum is so great, and how you can get started with Scrum in under 10
minutes. I'll cover all the core Scrum concepts, like product backlogs, team roles, sprints, burndown charts, and more.
So get ready to be bombarded with information.

Let’s say THIS is the product we want to build. For this product, we get all kinds of feature requests from customers,
executives, or even other team members. In Scrum, features are written from the perspective of the end-user, therefore,
features are known as user-stories. The collection of all these user-stories is called the product backlog.

Another way to think of the product backlog is to think of it as a wish list of all the things that would make this product
great. Once we have our wish list or the product backlog, we need to start planning which specific user-stories we're going
to put into a particular release of our product.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's back up a bit. To build this product, we need to have one or more people in
our team who are going to play a variety of roles. First, we need her. She plays the role of product owner, and helps make
sure the right features make it into the product backlog representing the users and customers of the product. She helps
set the direction of the product. Then, we need this guy. He is the Scrum Master and his job is to make sure the project is
progressing smoothly and that every member of the team has the tools they need to get their job done. He sets up
meetings, monitors the work being done and facilitates release planning. He's a lot like a project manager, but that's such
a boring title. So, we'll call him a Scrum Master [Karate yell] to imply he knows some Jui-Jitsu. And the rest of the team
has similar roles to other development processes. These guys build the product (developer), while these guys test it to
make sure it works right (tester). These guys use it, and hopefully pay for it (customer). And these guys, they generally get
in the way, but it turns out you can't build many products without them (executives).

But let’s get back to this: Release Planning.

To plan a release, the team starts with this, the product backlog, and they identify the user-stories they want to put into
this release. These user-stories then become part of the release backlog. The team then prioritizes the user-stories and
estimates the amount of work involved for each item. Sometimes larger user-stories are broken down into smaller more
manageable chunks. The collection of all the estimates provides a rough idea of the total amount of work involved to
complete the entire release.
A quick side note about estimates. There are a lot of techniques for creating good estimates. Some prefer estimating in
story points where estimates are made relative to building a small component with a known level of difficulty.
Unfortunately, story points don’t answer the question of, “When will my project ship?”

I have found that the best technique is to estimate work in hours, but to use some standards in how estimates are done.
For example, things that take less than a day to complete will be estimated as 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours or 8 hours.
Every item will fall into one of those buckets. There will be no 3 hour estimates, for example. A 3 hour item would fall into
the 4 hour bucket. Larger items will be estimated as 2 days, 3 days, 5 days, or 10 days. Again, all estimates in between will
fall into the next larger bucket. Extremely large items are similarly estimated in months: 1, 2, 3 or 6 Months, but the reality
is that such items will need to be broken down substantially before work actually begins. We’ll come back to these
estimates in just a minute.

But for now, let’s go back to this: The Release Backlog. With a prioritized set of user-stories and the estimated amount of
work at hand, we are now ready to plan out several sprints to get the work done. Sprints are short-duration milestones
that allow teams to tackle a manageable chunk of the project and get it to a ship-ready state. Sprints generally range from
a couple of days to as much as 30 days in length, depending on the product's release cycles. The shorter the release cycles,
the shorter each sprint should be. And you'll want to have at least 2 to as many as a dozen sprints in a given release.

So, at this point, we can take our release backlog and split it up into several of these: Sprint Backlogs.
One of the most important things to remember about sprints is that the goal of each sprint is to get a subset of the release
backlog to a ship-ready state. So, at the end of each sprint, you should have a fully tested product with all the features of
that sprint 100% complete. Since sprints are a very short, but a realistic representation of part of the product, a late finish
of the sprint is a great indicator that the project is not on schedule and something needs to be done.

Therefore, it's extremely important to monitor the progress of each sprint with THIS: A Burndown Chart.
The burndown chart is the number one reason for Scrum's popularity, and one of the best project visibility tools to ensure
a project is progressing smoothly. The burndown chart provides a day-by-day measure of the amount of work that remains
in a given sprint or release. In this graph, you can see that the amount of work remaining bounces up and down from day
to day, but is generally trending towards zero.

Because historical information is provided in the burndown chart, it's easy to see if the team is on the right track. Using
the burndown chart, the team can quickly calculate this: the slope of the graph, which is also called the Burndown
Velocity. This is the average rate of productivity for each day.

For example, a team's rate of productivity might be that on a typical day, they finish approximately 50 hours of work.
Knowing that, it's possible to calculate an estimated completion date for the sprint or even for the entire release, based
on the amount of work remaining. What's great about the burndown chart is that we can compare our actual velocity and
projected completion date to what the team needs to do in order to finish on time.

This is perhaps the most useful piece of knowledge that any team member, product owner or product executive can have
about the project, because knowing whether or not the project is on track early in the schedule can help teams make the
proper adjustments necessary to get the project on track. The burndown chart provides empirical proof that the project
is on track or if it's going to be late.
So, let's talk a little about where the data for this incredibly useful burndown chart comes from. As you recall, part of the
release planning process was to create an estimate for each user-story in the release backlog. The collection of these
estimates for a given sprint represents the total amount of work that must be done to complete that sprint. As each team
member goes through and makes progress on one or more of the user-stories, they simply update the amount of time
remaining for each of their own items. So, the total amount of time remaining on the group of user-stories that make up
a sprint, changes on a day-by-day basis, hopefully going downward until it hits zero when the sprint is complete. The
burndown chart aggregates the remaining work data and shows it visually. It's brilliant because it communicates a massive
amount of information in just a few seconds.

And that brings us to this: The Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum is an essential tool to having communication flow freely
between team members. The idea is to have fast paced stand-up meetings where team members quickly list the work
they completed since the last meeting, and any obstacles in their way. By meeting daily, it ensures the team is always in-
sync, and any major issues are dealt with as soon as they are known. Finally, as each sprint comes to a finish, it’s important
to have a Sprint Retrospective meeting, where the team can reflect on what went right and areas of improvement. After
all, Scrum is a flexible agile development method that needs constant improving and tweaking for every team.

So, there you have it. Scrum in under 10 minutes. You now know all the essential concepts to start implementing Scrum
inside of your organization.

But wait a second, what about tools to help you implement Scrum? Well, it just so happens that I’ve spent the last 10
years building such a tool. With a lot of help from these guys: a group of genius coders and design ninjas. The tool is called,
OnTime, and it helps you manage your products, your backlogs, your team, your releases and your sprints. It gives you
project visibility with burndown charts, and always answers the question of who is working on what.
You can get started with it for free, at Axosoft.com. Of course, you could use a giant white board, some note cards and a
bunch of different spreadsheets to track everything. You could also use an abacus instead of a calculator to do math, but
we’re getting a little off topic.

So, let's quickly review everything.

In Scrum, you work with this: a Product Backlog, which is nothing more than a list of features that we call User-Stories.
You then break down the product backlog into one or more Release Backlogs, and for a given release, you further break
up the release backlog into a number of Sprint Backlogs which are essentially short duration milestones throughout your
project. You then monitor the progress of each sprint using these: Burndown Charts and have Daily Scrum meetings to
ensure everything is on track. After each sprint, you have a Retrospective meeting to fine-tune everything.

And if you want a tool to implement Scrum, you can use, OnTime. It'll help you ship software, OnTime.
That’s all there is to it! Oh, and one last thing. Whether you loved or hated this video, I’d love to hear from you.
You can reach me on twitter or via email if you have any feedback. Now get going,
Create a great team, Collaborate, and Ship Software OnTime.

Review / Summary

- Product Backlog > Release Backlogs > Sprint Backlogs (short-duration milestones)

- Monitor progress of Sprints with Burndown Charts

- Daily Scrum Meetings to ensure everything is on track

- Retrospective Meetings after each Sprint for fine-tuning