Introduction to Scrum

Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 75 min

Questions

• What are the 3 key roles in a Scrum team?

• What are the different Scrum rituals?

• What are the Scrum artifacts?

Objectives

• Describe the 3 key roles in a Scrum team

• List the different Scrum rituals

• List the Scrum artifacts

One of the most popular methodologies that apply the Agile manifesto and principles is ‘Scrum’.

Exercise

To learn more about Scrum we follow this online course.

Please follow this ~1 hour course. It includes 3-8 minute video’s focusing on various Scrum topics, as well as accompanying exercises.

Discussion

Think about following the Scrum methodology when working on your projects in a team.

• What questions do you still have?
• Are there any incremental improvements that can benefit your team?
• What did you learn in the online course that you think is too much for your team?

The Scrum guide prescribes in the first chapter that one should either do Scrum completely, or not do Scrum:

Each element of the framework serves a specific purpose that is essential to the overall value and results realized with Scrum. Changing the core design or ideas of Scrum, leaving out elements, or not following the rules of Scrum, covers up problems and limits the benefits of Scrum, potentially even rendering it useless.

~ The Scrum Guide

Failure of a team doing Scrum is often blamed upon them not following the actual Scrum rules.

Discussion

Discuss with your team about the “all or nothing” statement in Scrum. Do you understand why it is there? Do you agree with this statement?

From experience we know that following the exact Scrum rules does not always fit a team well as the team might be bound by other restrictions. We will go deeper into the specific challenges that we run into when we want to do scientific research within a team (in episode 6). We will first discuss a different Agile implementation, called Kanban in the next episode.

Key Points

• Scrum is a powerful Agile methodology that demands an ‘all or nothing’ approach to work, but it is not a perfect fit for all teams.