How Scrum Works And Why You Should Choose It

It is difficult to find a person who did not hear about Scrum methodology and its implementation for development teams. At the same time, there are a lot of aspects of choosing Scrum methodology that are not familiar to most users. This article outlines the basic principles and roles in Scrum strategy, discusses why to select this methodology for your team, and defines its benefits for your company.

Understanding Scrum Framework

Scrum is an Agile framework for organizing teamwork for the most efficient and fast product development. Nowadays, Scrum strategy is used primarily in the IT sector, but at the same time, it can be effective for other industries. This approach allows rapid changes into features while the project is underway. Scrum principals encourage teams to learn from the experience, reflect on wins and losses for improvement and have a high level of self-organization for problem-solving.

Scrum is built on empiricism methodology. This strategy aims to satisfy customers' needs by transparent communication, collective responsibility, and continuous progress.

The strategy divides all work into short pieces that can be completed by the team in a short time sequence. These pieces are called sprints and can take from 2 to 4 weeks. The idea is quite simple - even the most challenging efforts can be divided into small and understandable tasks. This principle ensures better communication with clients and allows the team to learn faster.

Scrum Roles

The most effective Scrum team is 10 or fewer team members. After they divide work into manageable short tasks, they have 15-minutes regular meetings to track the progress and discuss possible problems. These teams also use Scrum Boards to manage sprints and visualize the progress.

Moreover, to work in Scrum framework, you will need to have some specific roles in the team. We used to define three primary roles in Scrum teams:

1. Product Owner. The person in this role needs to understand business goals, customers expectations, and market trends to navigate the software development process and ensure that the final product matches the organizational request.
2. Scrum Master. This is the person that makes sure the team is operating efficiently in a Scrum framework. This person ensures that Scrum values cover all the team requests, keep a team on track, facilitate meetings and manage all the problems the team meets working with Scum.
3. Development team. This is a team of professionals that work to complete tasks in sprints. It can be backend, frontend, or full-stack developers, engineers, DevOps, designers, marketers, and other specialists needed to achieve the goal. Development teams are used to collaborate to effectively map the goals and achieve them.

What are Scrum Artifacts?

The other important part in understanding how Scrum teamwork is outlining its artifacts. This is the information the team uses to make detailed product elaboration before development, actions to produce it, and processes sharing the product creation.

The major agile Scrum artifacts are:

• Product Backlog - the list of all possible changes, new features, bug fixes, or work requirements for building the product. The product backlog is a "live" artifact that is updated on-demand with further information. The product owner is responsible for maintaining this artifact.
• Sprint backlog - the set of tasks that were promoted for development during the next product increment. This backlog updates in the stage of sprint planning. If there are not enough people to do all the tasks, the remaining functions go to the sprint backlog for a future sprint.
  
• Product increment - the set of all items produced by compiling product backlog tasks before the end of the sprint. Product owners make a decision to release the increments or develop them in future sprints.

Scrum Values

As we mentioned already, Scrum is an agile methodology, and the values of this framework also rely on agile principles. The most important one is that people and relationships are more important than tools and processes.

There are other essential scrum values:

• Respect for all the team members
• Openness
• Focus on issues
• Commitment in team relations

Why Use Scrum in 2022?

Another critical point is to define that your team can be more efficient with Scrum strategy. There are some reasons to implement Scrum for your company:

1. Increase productivity. One of the most essential issues for choosing a Scrum framework. Your team will be focused on prioritized tasks in a scrum sprint and will not spend their time on tasks that are not important in the specific time sequence. It will make the team more efficient in achieving the goals.
2. Reduce risk. Scrum teams usually start with MVP and can discuss changes and functions of the product with clients after each sprint. It means that the team will not surprise businesses with the product that did not match expectations. The client sees all the development stages, and developers can be on one side with them during the whole process.
3. Grow team's freedom of action. Scrum strategy allows teams to break the big task into smaller achievable pieces. This ability helps your team to be more creative, efficient, and confident in the final result. It is a good tool for growing your team's talents.
4. Accelerate product delivery. As Scrum teams usually build MVP first, it allows users to start testing your product earlier. For the team, it also reduces the number of bugs before the final release. At the same time, dividing a task into sprints ensures effective and focused work, and as a result, faster product delivery.
5. Build better relationships with customers. Another point is to allow customers to implement all their ideas before the final product release. Scrum is a flexible strategy, and I'm most cases, the team will be able to add required changes without painful product rebuilding.
   

Final Thoughts

Scrum framework is one of the most effective ways to organize teamwork in product development. Scrum is a team-centric methodology, and it can be efficient in organizations with a lot of teams that work with different tasks. At the same time, even small companies can implement this strategy for maintaining workload and getting the best results.