Related Guides

Assumptions

Basics

Constraints

Project Management

Key Concepts

Project Management

Program Management Examples

Program Management Process

Project Quality

Schedule Compression

Project Risk

top » management » project management » agile » scrum

26 Examples of Scrum

John Spacey, updated on March 20, 2021

Scrum is an agile technique of project delivery that uses quick iterations that build working features that are potentially shippable. It is based on a set of conventions and unique language for things that could have used more common terms. This is intentional as scrum is designed to leave the old ways of project management behind. Scrum also depends on the unique culture that has evolved around it. Teams are encouraged to customize it, stress it and improve it. As a result, scrum has a slightly different flavor from one team to the next. The following are common scrum conventions.

Acceptance Criteria

A comprehensive list of user expectations for each user story that serve as detailed functional requirements.

Acceptance Testing

Acceptance testing is functional testing of the acceptance criteria in user stories. Also known as User Acceptance Testing, or UAT.

Backlog Refinement

Backlog refinement is the practice of improving product backlog items. For example, acceptance criteria may be added to user stories. Product backlog items may also be dropped if they are no longer needed.

Burndown Chart

A graphical representation of work remaining vs time that can be created for an epic, version or sprint.

Daily Scrum

A quick meeting held each day of a sprint that has a particular set of conventions. Each contributing member of a scrum team reports what they did yesterday, what they will do today and any impediments that are in their way.

Definition Of Done

Definition of Done is a set of completion criteria that a scrum team adopts to set expectations for what it means for a feature to be "done".

Epics

A big user story that is too big to implement directly but instead acts as a campaign that might include hundreds of user stories.

Feature

A feature is a general term for an epic, theme, user story or technical requirement.

Impediments

An impediment is any issue or problem that is preventing the completion of a feature that requires the attention of the scrum team.

Potentially Shippable

The features delivered by each sprint are potentially shippable. This indicates they can be launched if a business unit decides they're ready. The definition of done that each team adopts defines what it means for a feature to be potentially shippable.

Product Backlog

A product backlog is a prioritized list of user stories, technical requirements, bugs and knowledge acquisition activities associated with a particular product. It is normal for a product backlog to grow reasonably large as a pool of ideas for improving a product. In sprint planning, teams decide which items to move from the product backlog to the sprint backlog for the next sprint.

Product Owner

A single person who has authority to represent the customer on a scrum team. The product owner is responsible for the backlog, prioritization and clarifications of requirements. As scrum teams are self-organizing, the product owner has no particular authority over the team, despite representing the sponsoring business unit.

Release

Releasing the product to the customer. Each sprint ends with a potentially shippable product version. The product owner decides if the release is made by considering its value to customers against costs and risks.

Scrum Of Scrums

A meeting to coordinate the efforts of multiple scrum teams. Scrum teams are best kept small and scrum is scaled using multiple teams. As such, the scrum of scrums is the primary means of achieving scrum scale.

Scrum Team

Scrum teams are small with less than a dozen members or so. Roles on the team are kept as general as possible. For example, a scrum team might include a scrummaster, product owner and 4-6 developers.

Scrummaster

A scrummaster is a facilitator who coordinates the scrum team and owns the scrum process. It is specifically not a management role. The scrummaster makes sure the team lives up to the values and practices of scrum. For example, a scrummaster coaches members of the team in scrum and makes sure that the relationship between the product owner and the rest of the team is productive.

Spike

A term for activities such as research and prototyping that doesn't directly change the product.

Sprint

A sprint is the scrum development cycle. It is a short timeboxed effort of 1-4 weeks that delivers working code that is potentially shippable.

Sprint Backlog

A sprint backlog is a list of items to be completed on a sprint. Items may include user stories, bugs, non-functional requirements, knowledge acquisition and prototypes.

Sprint Goal

A short statement that gives a mission or theme to a sprint. In many cases, they are simply a descriptive summary of the sprint backlog.

Sprint Planning

A timeboxed meeting that plans a sprint. Involves clarifying items, developing estimates, prioritizing, moving items from the product backlog to the spring backlog and creating a sprint goal.

Sprint Retrospective

A short meeting to review a sprint and identify improvements.

Sprint Task

Tasks are things that need to be done to complete an item on the sprint backlog. They are typically tracked on a board with the headings to do, in process and done for each user story.