Scrum methodology is one type of agile methodology that is often used for software and product development.

Scrum depends mainly on iterative and incremental processes performed almost daily in a cycle till the final product or objective is obtained.

In definition, the Scrum methodology is a framework that is based on iterative and incremental development. This methodology helps teams to balance the needs of the customer with the team’s ability to deliver.

Scrum was first mentioned in 1986 in an article posted by two Japanese business experts; Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka published the article, “New New Product Development Game” in the Harvard Business Review, stating a new approach that would increase process speed and incredibly flexible to changes.

After that in 1995, Ken Schwaber and Dr. Jeff Sutherland provided a presentation that demonstrates the definition and values of Scrum, to the OOPSLA conference in Austin, Texas. They were both parts of a software design company called Easel Corporation in the late 1980s when they first encountered difficulties in working with large development projects. Their solution was to create a process framework that could help teams manage complex projects so that they could have successful outcomes with fewer risks. 

In 2001, Sutherland, Schwaber, and 15 other software development leaders created the manifesto for Agile Software Development. Shortly afterward, the agile alliance was founded and the first book on Scrum. In the years that followed, the Scrum Alliance was founded in 2002 by Schwaber and a certification arm was added to the organization with certified scrum master programs.

In 2006, Sutherland created Scrum Inc. and kept teaching certified scrum courses. In 2009, Schwaber left Scrum Alliance and started Scrum.org which offers a professional Scrum series to this day.

In 2010, the first scrum guide was published. There have been a few updates on it since then. The latest would be on the 25th Anniversary of the Scrum Framework in 2020.

Scrum Methodology is based mainly on empiricism and lean/fast thinking. Empiricism implies that knowledge is based on experience derived from previous or current work, this leads to more accurate decisions. Lean/fast thinking forces decision-makers to focus on the essentials which in turn reduces waste and saves time.

It employs an iterative, incremental method to optimize predictability and to manipulate risk. Scrum engages individuals that together have all of the abilities and knowledge to do the work and share or gather such abilities as needed.

Scrum combines four formal events for inspection and adaptation within a containing event, the Sprint. These events work because they implement the empirical Scrum pillars, they are:

First: Transparency

The work and processes done in the project must be visible to both those who are performing the work and those who are receiving the work. The team must make important decisions that are based on the perceived state of the three pillars, so if they have low transparency, the value will decrease and the risk will increase.

As stated in the Scrum Guide, Transparency enables inspection. Inspection without transparency is misleading and wasteful.

Second: Inspection

The tasks performed during the process must be inspected regularly and frequently to detect any undesirable issue or risk. To help with inspection, Scrum provides cadence in the form of its five events, which will be illustrated later in this article. These events are designed to provoke the change necessary to obtain the needed goals from this process.

Third: Adaptation

In the case of change that occurs during the sprints or any deviation from the acceptable limits or requirements, the process applied must be adjusted to adapt to the new change required.

Adaptation becomes more difficult when team members are not self-managing. A Scrum Team is expected to adapt the moment it learns anything new through inspection

Scrum values are the fundamental principles that guide the best companies in Agile software development. To succeed in the digital age, organizations need to be able to respond quickly and efficiently to changing business needs. Scrum can help them do so.

The basic idea behind Scrum is that teams should have a high degree of autonomy and self-organization, which facilitates responsiveness to customers and market needs.

Successful use of Scrum depends on people becoming more proficient in living five values:

Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage

Commitment to achieving the goal and supporting each other is required from any successful Scrum team.

The main focus of the sprint is to make progress towards the objectives needed in the best possible way.

All stakeholders must be Open to all challenges they may face during the work.

Respect among team members and trust that they are capable & independent people, is of utmost importance.

The Courage to do the right thing is an important characteristic.

Any decision made or step taken during this work should reinforce these values, not diminish or undermine them.

The fundamental unit of a Scrum team is mainly composed of developers, a product owner, and a scrum master. Within a Scrum Team, there are no sub-groups or hierarchies. It is a cohesive unit of professionals centered on one objective at a time, the Product Goal. They are cross-functional, the members have all of the technical skills essential to create value for each Sprint. They also are self-managing, they internally decide who does what, when, and how.

The team roles are:

1. The developer is responsible for the development tasks required to meet the product’s requirements.
2. The product owner is responsible for providing the vision and strategy for the product and managing dependencies with other teams and stakeholders.
3. The scrum master facilitates communication among stakeholders and ensures that the process is followed.

The Sprint is a box for all other events. Each event in Scrum is a proper opportunity to investigate and adopt Scrum artifacts. These events are mainly designed to allow and enable the transparency required. Failure to perform or operate any events as prescribed results in lost opportunities to investigate and adapt. Events are utilized in Scrum to create regularity and to reduce the need for meetings not defined in Scrum.

Optimally, all events are held at the same time and place to lessen the complexity.

These events are:

1. The sprint; they are the most important event in the scrum. it is where ideas are turned to value. they are always the same length, usually a month or less. the newsprint starts after the conclusion of the previous one. It contains all the work needed to achieve the product or project objective, including sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, and retrospective. A Sprint can be canceled if the Sprint Goal becomes obsolete. Only the Product Owner has the authority to cancel the Sprint.
2. Sprint Planning; Sprint Planning initiates the Sprint by laying out the work to be performed for the Sprint. This resulting plan is created by the collaborative work of the entire Scrum Team. In this plan, three main topics are addressed. the value of the sprint, what can be done during, and how will the work be executed.
3. Daily Scrum; the main basis here is to check the progress toward the main goal and change the sprint backlog accordingly, adjusting the upcoming planned work in the process. it is usually a 15-minute event for the developers.
4. Sprint Review; this review is meant to inspect the outcome of the sprint and determine the changes or adaptations needed in the next sprint. The Scrum Team presents the results of their work to key stakeholders and then the progress to the Goal is discussed.
5. Sprint Retrospective; the goal here is to plan ways to increase the quality and effectiveness of the work performed during the next sprint. It is timeboxed to a maximum of three hours for a one-month Sprint

These artifacts represent the work of value, they are designed to provide maximized transparency of key information. The philosophy behind it is that it should have a commitment to reinforce empiricism and the scrum values for the team and stakeholders.

These artifacts are:

1. Product Backlog; a list of all work needed to improve the product.
2. Sprint Backlog; consists of the sprint goal, the product backlog items selected for the sprint, and the action plan for the increment delivery.
3. Increment; is the stepping stone toward the main goal. Each increment is additive to all prior increments in a way that ensures all of them work together to provide value.

Development methodologies are published around 15 years ago, before that the speed of change which was lacking at that time was causing a lot of problems, and by the time the software was ready for deployment, the business requirements would have changed this not catering to the current needs,

The leaders of development teams of different development methodologies decided on the way forward, and they were able to agree upon a better method and also were able to finalize the wording for the manifesto, and to deliver working software is the primary measure of progress,

it is the simplest and minimalistic approach to give power to the scrum team, give a competitive advantage to the customer, engage the ends like business and development team,

Agile principles empower teams with tighter control over their projects and give them the support they need and trust. Team-members know exactly what to do in each sprint, while the greater emphasis on collaboration and communication reduces the danger of mistakes or oversights, builds projects around motivated individuals. Using automated software streamlines processes and cuts down the time wasted on avoidable manual tasks, in a shorter timescale

The 12 principles of Agile Manifesto were a result came to fix most of the issues to a large extent, it’s like a guiding force that supports the project teams in executing agile-based projects, the 12 principles of agile manifesto are used as a litmus test to identify if some project is being run on agile or not.

The difficulty of organizing your project just gets harder with every additional person you add to the project. Agile approaches are focused on breaking down the project into smaller, once you know the answer of What is Agile beginner? You’ll find the other answers of Who should work on what part of the codebase? What is the most important thing to build first? How will you decide what to work on next? What happens if you get overwhelmed by the scope of a feature or a really big bug?

Who will decide what features are most important to the business or company you’re working for? Who will decide how a user should interact with a feature or what it should look like in the browser? Who will decide when something needs to be built or what bugs are most important to fix?

This exactly where Agile practices come in!

The move to becoming an agile organization brings change. It impacts on the traditional culture and introduces new ways of working on projects, so not everyone will be convinced! What does it take to successfully introduce that change? Agile project management has come a long way since its emergence in the world of IT back in the 1990s.

What if we could create workplaces that drew on all the talents of those doing the work?

What if those talents were totally focused on delivering extraordinary value to the customers and other stakeholders for whom the work is being done?

What if those receiving this unique value would be willing to offer generous recompense for it?

What would these workplaces look like? How would they operate? How would they be reconciled with existing goals, principles, and values? Could they operate at scale? If so, would the answers have implications for all organizations, not just software development?”

Agility is the key to envisioning a profitable and sustainable future for every organization and company, whatever the size or market you operate in. Also, Agile ways of working can be defined as humanistic work focused on customer value, the most productive and successful teams work collaboratively. The values and principles of Agile will help you achieve such a culture of collaboration,

Agile is not just a process or methodology; it’s a mindset that embraces challenges and views failures as learning opportunities. It is the game-changer that helps us embrace what it means to be agile, Focuses on developing leaders who are adaptive and agile in their leadership style. This is where leaders learn to lead themselves first and create an environment that will allow agility to thrive.

Agile was seen as a set of management practices relevant to software development. That’s because Agile’s initial advocates were software developers and its foundational document was the Manifesto for Software Development of 2001, Agile is now spreading rapidly to all parts and all types of organizations.

Agile’s emergence as a huge global movement extending beyond software is driven by the discovery that the only way for organizations to cope with today’s turbulent customer-driven marketplace is to become Agile. Agile enables organizations to master continuous change. It permits firms to flourish in a world that is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

Leading with Agility certification is valuable to anyone wishing to learn about the paradigm shifts necessary to lead in adaptive environments and to develop relevant leadership capabilities.

By adopted agile and agile practices, there came to be a striking convergence toward a family of goals, principles, and values that were demonstrably more productive and responsive to customer needs than traditional management.

As Agile is increasingly applied to large scale projects, the gains that become possible at firms are dramatic, particularly the ability to deliver instant, frictionless, personalized responsiveness at scale,

An agile organization is an increasingly urgent necessity for companies in today’s digital economy, yet most companies have a deeply embedded command organization architecture and culture. This reflects, first and foremost, the industrial economy mindsets and skills of their senior leaders,

Agile is a genuinely better way to run a company and an economy—better for those doing the work, better for those for whom the work is done, better for the organization itself. Instead of management extracting value from the firm, Agile generates value for customers and for society as a whole.

There are a number of reasons why an Agile mindset is paramount on your Agile journey. Here are our top three:

1. An Agile mindset helps you be Agile while doing Agile. Well-known frameworks provide great tools and techniques to help teams execute in an agile manner. However, an Agile mindset is key to being agile, resulting in sustainable agility manifested through people, not processes.
2. An Agile mindset allows you to tailor methodologies for your reality. Agile processes will and should continue to evolve as organizations learn more and build agile capability. An Agile mindset gives you the flexibility to blend agile methods and even invent new frameworks to maximize collaboration and innovation.
3.  An Agile mindset helps bring out the best in your teams and organizations. Having an agile mindset is synonymous with a culture of continuous learning. Learning agility helps people reach their potential and is a critical ingredient for business agility.

When Agile is done right, all parts of the organization are continuously exploring how to add more value to customers. This not only creates meaning for those doing the work and delights those for whom the work is done: it results in generous returns to the organization itself.

In a study published in the Journal of Operations Management, agile methodologies contributed to operational performance which in turn contributed to the marketing and financial performance of the organization.

In additional research, 54% of people reported agile approaches (specifically scrum) resulted in improved satisfaction with deliverables, People must be dedicated to agile teams.

Research across 160,000 projects and 50,000 agile teams found when team members were 95% dedicated to an agile team, their productivity doubled, compared to teams in which members were only 50% dedicated, Teams must be stable to reap the full benefits of agile.

While it is relatively rare for team members to remain the same from quarter-to-quarter, a higher percentage of stability contributes to 60% better productivity, 40% better predictability, and 60% better responsiveness.

In another exploration, 88% of over 2,000 respondents representing 91 countries and 27 industries reported agile—and the scrum methodology specifically—improves the quality of life. Agile is easy to learn, but difficult to master and therefore requires a sustained commitment for implementation, learning, and ongoing improvement.

It is a journey that is never complete, but the reasons for investing are clear in its results. For most companies, the people and business results make it well worth the effort.

Agile is easy to learn, but difficult to master and therefore requires a sustained commitment for implementation, learning, and ongoing improvement.

It is a journey that is never complete, but the reasons for investing are clear in its results.

For most companies, the people and business results make it well worth the effort.

It abandons the risk of spending months or years on a process that ultimately fails because of some small mistake in an early phase. It relies instead on trusting employees and teams to work directly with customers to understand the goals and provide solutions in a fast and incremental way.

Agile methodology is a practice that promotes continuous iteration of development and testing throughout the software development lifecycle of the project, both development, and testing activities are concurrent

Agile methodologies, which involve new values, principles, practices, and benefits and are a radical alternative to command-and-control-style management—are spreading across a broad range of industries and functions,

Also, there are no less than 40 groups, companies, and methodologies that claim to have the corner on how agile is best applied., but they must include the following principles—one way or another:

• Focus on people over process.
• Embed customers and their feedback in order to continuously improve.
• Deconstruct work into small segments and organize effort into short chunks in order to get quick feedback and make agile course corrections.
• Dedicate people to teams and focus on one project at a time.
• Experiment and learn continuously.
• Ensure transparency of the work and continuity of the team.
• Faster, smaller. Traditional software development relied on phases like outlining the requirements, planning, design, building, testing, and delivery. Agile methodology, by contrast, looks to deploy the first increment in a couple of weeks and the entire piece of software in a couple of months.
• Communication. Agile teams within the business work together daily at every stage of the project through face-to-face meetings. This collaboration and communication ensure the process stays on track even as conditions change.
• Feedback. Rather than waiting until the delivery phase to gauge success, teams leveraging Agile methodology track the success and speed of the development process regularly. Velocity is measured after the delivery of each increment.
• Trust. Agile teams and employees are self-organizing. Rather than following a manifesto of rules from management intended to produce the desired result, they understand the goals and create their own path to reach them.
• Adjust. Participants tune and adjust the process continually, following the KIS or Keep It Simple principle.

The Agile software development methodology is one of the simplest and effective processes to turn a vision for a business need into software solutions. Agile is a term used to describe software development approaches that employ continual planning, learning, improvement, team collaboration, evolutionary development, and early delivery. It encourages flexible responses to change.

• Individual and team interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

The most popular and common examples are Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Feature Driven Development (FDD), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Adaptive Software Development (ASD), Crystal, and Lean Software Development (LSD). Teams generally pick one or two methods. The most widely used methodologies are Scrum and XP, which dovetail nicely.

There are various Agile methods present in agile testing, and those are listed below: 

Scrum is an agile development method that concentrates specifically on how to manage tasks within a team-based development environment. Basically, Scrum is derived from an activity that occurs during a rugby match. Scrum believes in empowering the development team and advocates working in small teams (say- 7 to 9 members).

-Process flow of Scrum Methodologies:

Process flow of scrum testing is as follows:

• The product backlog is a list where all details are entered to get the end-product
• During each Sprint, top user stories of Product backlog are selected and turned into Sprint backlog
• The team works on the defined sprint backlog
• Team checks for the daily work
• At the end of the sprint, the team delivers product functionality

It consists of three roles, and their responsibilities are explained as follows:

Master is responsible for setting up the team, sprint meeting, and removes obstacles to progress.

The Product Owner creates a product backlog, prioritizes the backlog, and is responsible for the delivery of the functionality at each iteration

The team manages its own work and organizes the work to complete the sprint or cycle

This is a repository where requirements are tracked with details on the no of requirements
(user stories) to be completed for each release. It should be maintained and prioritized by the Product Owner, and it should be distributed to the scrum team. The team can also request for a new requirement addition or modification or deletion        

– Here’s an example of how Scrum works: Bill meets with a customer to discuss her company’s needs. Those needs are the product backlog. Bill chooses the most important tasks to work on in the next two weeks. His team meets in a daily scrum to target work for the day ahead and address roadblocks. At the end of the sprint, Bill delivers the work, reviews the backlog, and sets the goal for the next sprint. The cycle repeats until the software is complete.

Often used with scrum, XP is an example of how Agile can heighten customer satisfaction. Rather than deliver everything the customer could ever want far in the future, it gives them what they need now, fast. XP is centered on frequent releases and short development cycles. It uses a code review, pair programming, unit testing, and frequent communication with the customer.

-Here’s an example of how XP works: Bill builds a list of customer requirements by having the customer tell “user stories” that outline the features. From there, he builds a software release plan. The software will be delivered in iterations, with one delivered every couple of weeks. The team works in programmer pairs, using daily meetings to smooth roadblocks. The customer delivers feedback in the form of more user stories. The cycle repeats until the software is delivered.

These bring out the uniqueness involved in Agile Scrum projects and identifies the traits required for a successful team, so there are several things which cause an agile project to be different from projects based upon more traditional approaches, including:

1– Set priorities. A product backlog is a list of prioritized tasks maintained by a product owner.

2- Maintain small release cycles. The product should be released in increments every 2-4        weeks, with stakeholders giving feedback before proceeding.

3- Use pair programming. Two programmers work side-by-side at a single computer. This technique actually results in an identical degree of productivity to separate programming but delivers higher quality.

4- Refactor. Rework code regularly to achieve the same result with greater efficiency and clarity.

5- Use test-driven development. Code the unit test first to keep the project on task throughout. Test-driven development as an Agile best practice also produces greater employee engagement, since it transforms testing from a boring grind to a coding challenge.

As agile teams work differently from normal teams and depend a lot on effective and efficient communication and fast execution, there is an increased need to use soft skills. If we are aware of this and actively encourage the use of some of these traits and skills, we can make agile teams more meaningful and productive.

Self-organization usually relies on basic ingredients like Positive feedback, Negative feedback, Balance of exploitation and exploration, and multiple interactions. From our experience, a team may fail to give the right kind of feedback and shy away from interaction because of many cultural and social issues.

Good discipline, the ability to take responsibility, be committed, and take accountability and ownership.

The ability to ask for help and to seek out review. In certain cases, we had seen the ‘ego’ factoring out as a major impediment.

The ability to take initiative, enjoying working in an intense environment, and adapting to new situations and frameworks easily.

Taking responsibility, being committed, and a spirit of collaboration are sometimes taken for granted; however, from our experience, we sometimes need external interventions to make these happen.

Most of the projects must be distributed, meaning there will be a co-development scrum between the client and the service provider. In these contexts, skills like managing diversity, time management, diplomacy, and leadership are very essential.

•  Agile life cycles are composed of several iterations or incremental steps towards the completion of a project

Agile is an old hat for IT executives, who have been applying its small-team approach and rapid feedback loops for more than 25 years, and for good reason.

Agile methods have more than tripled average success rates in tens of thousands of software development projects. In large, complex projects, Iterative approaches are frequently used in software development projects to promote velocity and adaptability since the benefit of iteration is that you can adjust as you go along rather than following a linear path.

• The Agile approach leads to higher satisfaction among both employees and customers. Now companies far beyond the tech industry are applying Agile methods to everything from marketing to corporate strategy.
• An Agile approach would split the project into segments and then prioritize—ruthlessly, if necessary—the key features to develop. The team could then focus entirely on completing one segment at a time.

To determine priorities, engineers could rank each feature on a scale of 1 to 10, based on its value to the customer or other metrics, such as projected revenue and the resources required to create it. In this case, the team might determine that :

 the digital-catalog delivery system could generate the most revenue with the lowest upfront investment. So the team assigns the delivery system a value of 10.

The remote stylist function will be slightly harder to design and may not have quite as big an impact on sales, so the team assigns it a value of 7

If the engineers deliver all the features simultaneously after 18 months, the company will reap the benefits of each for six months in the two-year cycle.

Also, Agile can produce similarly excellent results—even outside the IT department.

The list below shows some of the best tools of agile:

ActiveCollab An affordable tool for small businesses, ActiveCollab is easy to use. This software development aid requires little training and provides excellent support.

Agilo for Scrum Stakeholders gets updated automatically on the project’s progress with Agilo for Scrum. Features sprint reports and burn down charts for better data mining.

Atlassian Jira + Agile This powerful project management tool facilitates development by incorporating Scrum, Kanban, and customizable workflows.

Pivotal Tracker This methodology tool is geared specifically for mobile projects. A little jargon-heavy, it’s user-friendly after a brief orientation period.

Prefix  This free tool from Stackify provides an instant feedback loop to catch and fix bugs before they can deploy.

Retrace for a more robust solution complete with monitoring, errors, logs, and more, Stackify’s Retrace provides app performance insights from integration to QA to production, at the code level.

1- Product Passion: For sure it is one of the most important skills every product manager should have. This skill is about the passion of knowing and testing new products. 

2-Customer Empathy: PM should has the ability to understand the problems customers might face from their point of view not from his point of view. 

3-Intelligence/ Problem Solving: problem-solving abilities .. how you think it is important and will affect your skills and your professionality as a product manager. Also, the way you deal with data and how you can take the right decision based on it is important. 

4-Confidence: As a PM if your team felt that you can not take decisions or you don’t have the confidence to make up your mind. 

5-Communication: If you have an idea inside your mind as a PM it is important to know how to present it in a simple way with some examples. And forsure to have the ability to communicate with the team and to know how to tell them your idea and explain your point is important . 

Reference: https://bit.ly/37PIMOz

Habit #1 Love your users:

To love your users you have to know them first. So, you have to contact them and try to know how they think and for sure that will reflect in your daily tasks priorities or even the features you want to add as a part of your development process.

Habit #2 What and why(not how):

As a product manager try to focus on what and why, and less on how. As a PM, you should have space to think more about what should be done and implement  how that will reflect in your users and if this is important now or not.In order to do that you have to trust and work effectively with your designers and development partners.

Habit #3 Invest in relationships:

What makes a great product manager? It Is to act, talk and effectively communicate in many ways with your team. The ability and to think how you can go deep and invest in the relationships with people you work with. All of that might happen in a really simple way such as to understand them to know what makes them happy in work or what they dislike and what can be changed in work environment to make it more convenient.

Habit #4 Be decisive…but also flexible.

Yes, you should have strong decisions and perspective ideas but also you should be flexible in order to make something done. Have a confidence to take decisions but make the conversation to go and come. Also, have the ability to change your mind easily!

Habit #5 Be curious:

Be curious about the industry, designers, or technology. So every PM should take the time to know and learn about the technology. You don’t have to be a engineer but you have to ask about details.

Habit #6 Embrace “no”:

You have to embrace the fact that you may say no. But, you have to take the time to know when, how, and why to say the No. You are a product manager so you can solve problems. Also, most of the PMs try to make all the people happy but in order to make people happy you have to learn to say No if things are wrong.

Habit #7 Cultivate your grit:

Product management is difficult, but to make things a habit that helps you all the time.

Made a habit to think logically and to not be down when things go rough. The ability to move back or to move obstacles is really a powerful key and actually the best way for us as PMs to improve.

Source: https://productschool.com/