By Fortunate NNEJI
What is scrum? Scrum is a great way for teams to work together to develop a product. Product development using Scrum occurs in small pieces. Here, each new piece of the product is built upon previously created pieces.
Building products one small piece at a time encourages creativity and enables teams to respond to feedback and change, to build exactly and only what is needed.
It is important that modern software development processes be able to look beyond sequential development processes that work in a repetitive fashion. This will allow them to focus better on delivery time, ROI, and adapting to evolving customer needs in an efficient manner.
To meet these needs, Scrum follows an iterative and incremental approach to software development. It progresses in a consecutive series of time-boxed iterations called sprints, each of which is typically 2-4 weeks long. Thus, Scrum works best for projects where the requirements are changing.
Large teams are a challenge to any management. A hierarchical structure seems to be a better solution to manage the different aspects. But with more command and control often comes delays in decision-making, and a chance of autocratic attitudes killing creative energies. Whereas, small autonomous teams, therefore, present a better answer to these problems. The small teams are:
- Goal-oriented
- Self- organizing
- Empowered
- Better motivated
So let’s see how to use Scrum for small development teams to get better results:
The product owner is the key stakeholder or the key user in the project. He usually also represents other users and customers. A product owner should take ownership of the product backlog. During the development process, any team member can add anything to the product backlog, but only the product owner has the right to prioritise it.
The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that the product is being built the right way. He ensures that the team is being productive by assisting the team with implementing the Scrum process. He also helps remove any obstructions to progress during the sprint.
The first step that takes place at the beginning of each sprint is a sprint planning meeting where the product owner and the software development team discuss the highest priority items on the product backlog.
They figure out how many items they can actually commit to completing during that sprint and create a sprint backlog which is essentially the list of tasks that are to be performed during the sprint along with an estimate for the amount of time each will require.
At the end of each sprint, the team is required to produce and demonstrate a potentially shippable product increment.
During each sprint session, the team also attends daily scrum meetings of no more than 15 minutes to discuss their progress and any possible hindrances in the way of delivering working, high-quality software.
At the end of each sprint, a sprint review is conducted where the team has to demonstrate the functionality that was added during the sprint. The idea is to obtain feedback from the product owner and other users whose feedback can be incorporated into the functionality. It may also mean adding more items to the scrum product backlog.
Another activity called the sprint retrospective is performed as well at the end of each sprint in which the whole team including the Scrum Master and the Product Owner takes part in order to reflect on the sprint that just ended and identify innovative ways to improve in the upcoming sprint.
***Fortunate Jideofor Nneji is a Senior Product Manager at Sabi.am where he leads the product team focused on the E-commerce experience that drives merchants to buy stock for their shops online.
His goal with the team is to scale up the discovery and delivery capacity of the team to meet user needs in various African countries
With over 7 years in product, he has guided the growth of multiple products and product people across E-commerce, Energy, and Education
