IF YOU CHANGE NOTHING, NOTHING WILL CHANGE
AGILE
Agile development is a different (non traditional) way to develop Products. Agile methodologies include XP (engineering practice), Scrum (management practice) and Kanban amongst others. All Agile frameworks have common characteristics such as team work, customer collaboration, high visibility, iterative and incremental delivery, value driven work, fast feedback, responsiveness to change, frequent releases etc. Agile primarily applied to software but has been successfully adopted by many other industries and areas
SCRUM
Scrum is an Agile management practice. Scrum provides a framework to help manage a process. Scrum prescribes 3 roles, 5 main ceremonies or events and 3 main artifacts. Scrum is simple to understand but difficult to master. Most people who start on their own end up doing something else. This is the reason new teams are often asked to use Scrum as it comes out of the box for sometime before they start to change the recipe.
TEAM
Team is the essence of Agile way of working. Agile teams move through forming -> storming -> norming -> performing stages. High performing Agile teams are a delight to behold. Agile teams work towards becoming more cross functional. They manifest Agile principles in their actions. The servant leader Scrum Master guides the team and helps them to self organize and achieve their goals
CEREMONIES
Agile team events are traditionally referred to as ceremonies. Agile ceremonies are sacred, meaning they are not (generally) skipped. Sprint planning, Daily Standup, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective and Backlog Refinement are the 5 main ceremonies. Every ceremony is timeboxed for focus and effectiveness. Scrum Master ideally facilitates the ceremonies
USER STORIES
Agile teams break larger pieces of work into smaller units called “user stories”. User story means the story (steps) of the user on how he / she would use a product or a feature. User stories are worked upon and delivered in a timeboxed event called sprint or iteration. Agile user stories add up to a larger functionality that is of value to the end user or customer. Ideally, a user story has all work (Analysis, Design, Development, Testing etc.) included in it.
ROLES
The three main roles in Scrum are: Development Team, Product Owner and the Scrum Master.
These three roles balance and complement each other if played by the right people with the right mindset. The development team is referred to as “Team” or “The Team”. The Scrum Master, Product Owner and the Team together form the larger “Scrum Team”
