Because the design philosophy of ZenTao is based on Scrum, it will help you learn and use ZenTao better, if you could understand the basic concepts in Scrum.
1. Agile
Waterfall is the well-known method of software project management, and its basic process is story -> development -> test. It is assumed that the final result is right, if each phase is done correctly. There are successful cases with Waterfall, such as Microsoft. But, in general, it has a relatively high failure rate. Software pioneers have made a series of researches, thinkings, and summaries about the problems found in the Waterfall methodology and finally put up the concept of Agile. There are various methods of Agile development, and Scrum is a relatively popular one.
2. Scrum
2.1 Scrum RolesScrum roles include the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and the Development team.
- Product Owner is responsible for collecting user stories, defining their commercial values, prioritizing them and making release plans. They are fully responsible for the product.
- Scrum masters are in charge of holding various meetings, coordinating projects and serving the Development team.
- Development team is a group of people with different skills. They complete each sprint and deliver products through close cooperations.
2.2 Sprint
Being different from the waterfall development, the product development in Scrum is decomposed into a number of sprints. Usually, a sprint is 1~4 weeks and done by 5~9 team members. User stories to accomplish is fixed in each sprint. Each sprint will bring a certain delivery.
2.3 Basic process of Scrum
The basic workflow of Scrum is shown as above.
- Product owners collect user stories and create the product backlog as shown at the left of the image above.
- Release Planning Meeting: product owners explain user stories, estimate and prioritize them. The output of release planning meeting is to make a story list of each sprint and to record sprint backlog.
- Sprint Planning Meeting: project teams do task breakdown for each story. The breakdown standard is that all the tasks must be finished and each task is assigned to a specific person with an estimation of man-hours.
- Daily Scrum Meeting: Scrum masters hold a daily stand-up meeting, and the team members report what they did yesterday and what they will do today, and what their problems are.
- Review Meeting: when a sprint is over, all members involved will get together to have a review meeting. The team will show the deliverables of the Sprint. All the feedbacks should be recorded and compiled to create new stories.
- Retrospective Meeting: project teams summarize the sprint, identify the deficiency and make plans in next sprint for continuous improvement.
See also
