Questions on the scrum guide and to prepare for PSM I
Hi,
I was going through the scrum guide to prepare for PSM Level 1 and had a few questions. It will be great if these can be answered.
1. As per the guide, Scrum makes clear the relative efficacy of your product management and development practices so that you can improve. – How does scrum achieve this because scrum is just a framework and doesn’t have benchmarks to compare an org’s product management and development practices.
2. A ‘Done’ product increment means that the product increment completed in a sprint meets the definition of Done established by the scrum team such that it is available to be released to the customer, correct? Now, in many projects every product increment goes through phases of testing – Unit testing -> Quality team testing – UAT and all three phases cannot be done in one sprint. In my project, the first two testing phases were completed in a sprint whereas the UAT phase of Sprint N used to start along with the development work on Sprint N+1. So it seems that the definition of Done that the organization was following was that the first two testing phases should be complete in a sprint though the increment is still not releasable. Was the definition of Done incorrect?
3. The actual scrum assessment has 60 questions to be answered in 80 minutes, however the scrum open assessment has 30 questions to be answered in 30 mins. Are there other open assessments that I can take?
4. The scrum guide says that in a Sprint Review, The Development Team discusses what went well during the Sprint, what problems it ran into, and how those problems were solved. Should not this be a part of Sprint retrospective?
5. The guide says that in a sprint review, the entire group (scrum team and stakeholders) discuss on what to do next, how the market place has changed, review the timeline, budget etc. My question is that is all this done in a sprint review or outside the sprint review among the Product owner, key business team and development team stakeholders? It might not be required to involve entire scrum team in the above discussion.
6. In one of the questions in the scrum guide, it says that the length of the sprint should be short enough to be able to synchronize the development team with other business events. Which business events is this option talking about?
7. How does the scrum master help the product owner in understanding product planning in an empirical environment?
8. As per the scrum guide, scrum recognizes no sub-teams in development teams and everyone is a developer. This means that a business analyst, tester would not be a part of the development team. Then where does a business analyst, tester fit in a scrum team?
Hi, Vishal
1-Scrum is a powerful tool which provide inspect & adapt loops. The efficiency of any practice will be made transparent by Scrum.
2-A Sprint is a mini-project, but definitely not a mini-waterfall cycle with phases. Every task is done inside a sprint, typically analyse ; coding ; unit-testing ; UAT ; performance testing ; required documentation...
3-There are 4 different interesting open assessment on the https://www.scrum.org/Assessments/Open-Assessments page. You should try them all.
4-The Scrum Team present the increment and just the "big" picture about how the sprint was executed, in order to adapt the Product Backlog. During the retrospective, the Scrum Team will craft a plan to improve the process, not during the review.
5-Why don't you want to have the whole Scrum Team in the review ? Do you have star-members and slave-member in your "team" ?
6-Frequent releases to external customers who don't want to wait 4 weeks before the next release ?
7-The Scrum Master helps the PO ; the Dev Team ; the organization to understand how Scrum works. If Scrum is new to them, they won't catch the agile mind-set in 5 minutes.
8-"Dev Team" is not "Coder Team". Dev Team = the people with the required skills to build the product = analyst + coder + tester + writer +...
Hope it helps
Thanks for your reply, Olivier.
2. So in my example, is it a gross deviation to conduct UAT of sprint N along with development work of Sprint N+1? I think this was done so that the dev team can pick up more stories/features in a sprint by doing UAT in the next sprint. I also agree there are a lot of cons to this approach. I think in an ideal scenario, every stage (analysis, design, coding, testing, UAT, documentation) should be in the same sprint but if an organization deviates and modifies the Definition of Done as in my example, it seems like an gross exception to the scrum rules which means then that the organization is not following scrum in entirety?
5. I agree the entire scrum team should be present in the demo but I was asking about that portion of the sprint review wherein the Product Owner inspects the work done till now and projects the likely completion dates, inspect how the market/competition has changed to adjust priorities, inspect the timeline, budget etc. Is the entire scrum team required for this as many members of the dev team might not be even interested? So this portion might also be done separately by the PO, key business and dev team stakeholders?
> So in my example, is it a gross deviation to conduct UAT of sprint N along with development work of Sprint N+1?
It is clearly a deviation from having a potentially releasable increment by the end of Sprint N, which would be the objective of a Scrum Sprint.
> ...Is the entire scrum team required for this as many members of the dev team might not be even interested?
Why wouldn't they be interested? Who else is going to provide the next increment of work and ensure it meets market needs? Who else is going to advise the Product Owner regarding timelines for delivery, and the resources that will be needed to do the work?
To add my 2 cents on Ian comment, the review is a good time for the PO to motivate the Dev Team, by providing them a clear vision and target on the product they will build in the next sprints.
They are not coding-robot, they are people, they need a goal.
Thank you. I have few more questions.
1. A question in the Product Owner open assessment was whether any pre-conditions need to be fulfilled in order to allow sprint planning to begin. I selected ‘Enough Ready product backlog to fill the sprint”. But the correct answer was no such pre-conditions exist. How can sprint planning start without product backlog items that are ready and refined?
2. As per the scrum guide, the backlog items committed in a sprint and the sprint goal should never change but at the same time the product owner and development team can re-negotiate scope in a sprint. So, if the sprint goal is to enable users to search for doctors in and around a particular area using say 10 parameters but the dev team finds out in-sprint that only 5 parameters can be completed due to unforeseen work, didn't the sprint goal change then?
> How can sprint planning start without product
> backlog items that are ready and refined?
Why allow it to be an impediment to starting? If the Product Backlog is empty then the team can plan enough of one to allow development to start. The bias in Scrum is towards positive and timeboxed action.
> As per the scrum guide, the backlog items
> committed in a sprint and the sprint goal
> should never change...
Are you sure that backlog items are committed and should never change? Which version of the Guide are you using?
Hi Ian,
Thanks for your response.
>Why allow it to be an impediment to starting?
If there are no ready and refined backlog items, what is the point of a sprint planning? In that case, the product owner and development team should first refine the backlog items so that sprint planning can begin. So to say that no pre-conditions exist for sprint planning is misleading i think. To clarify it further, here is a line from the scrum guide 'Product Backlog items that can be “Done” by the Development Team within one Sprint are deemed “Ready” for selection in a Sprint Planning.'
>Are you sure that backlog items are committed and should never change? Which version of the Guide are you using?
My apologies. I read it somewhere else and not the scrum guide.
> If there are no ready and refined backlog
> items, what is the point of a sprint
> planning? In that case, the product
> owner and development team should
> first refine the backlog items so that
> sprint planning can begin. So to say that
> no pre-conditions exist for sprint
> planning is misleading i think.
The point of Sprint Planning is to frame a Sprint Goal and to make a forecast of the work needed for its achievement. If no scope has yet been defined, then that is no reason to delay the commencement of a Sprint, but it is an indication that Sprint Planning must establish an appropriate scope.
> To clarify it further, here is a line from
> the scrum guide 'Product Backlog items
> that can be “Done” by the Development
> Team within one Sprint are deemed
> “Ready” for selection in a Sprint Planning.'
Yes, and so they would be. However that doesn't make their existence a pre-condition for Sprint Planning.