PMI-ACP Certification: The Scrum Development Process

The Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles

The term "scrum" originates from the rugby formation, in which a team's players work together to gain possession of the ball. The agile methodology of Scrum borrows this term to describe a framework of project management processes and techniques. Scrum enables project teams to develop complex products quickly and efficiently, to adapt to change, and to regularly deliver value to customers in the form of working products. 

The Science of Better Learning

The scrum approach

The product owner is usually a customer representative, whose main focus is to represent the interests of the customer throughout the development process. The product owner measures how well a project performs in terms of return on investment, or ROI. 

In a Scrum team, the Scrum Master is the expert on all Scrum-related issues and ensures that everyone works according to Scrum principles and practices. He or she should also shield the development team from external processes and control, so they can fully concentrate on development. The Scrum Master may be a member of the development team.

A Scrum team usually consists of five to nine individuals who share the responsibility for developing a product and delivering it to the product owner at the end of each sprint. The optimal team is self- organizing and cross-functional. 

Agile project team, scrum team, and development team

You're working as a Scrum Master on a project that involves developing tracking software for a transport company. 

In the Scrum approach, effective communication is vital for ensuring that a Scrum team understands customer requirements, and that development team members can work together efficiently to solve complex problems.

The role of Scrum meetings is to ensure communication flows smoothly between the different stakeholders and team members. There are five types of Scrum meetings – the sprint planning meeting, the daily standup meeting, the Scrum of Scrums, the sprint review meeting, and the sprint retrospective

Sprints are recurring processes.

The core of Scrum, originally referred to as the "game" by its creators, describes how to prepare and run Sprints. While not officially described as such in the Scrum guide, the phases of a Scrum project cycle could be considered and are sometimes described as pre-game, game, and post-game.

The game phase refers to the sprint, or development, phase. This is when the development team plans each sprint and proceeds to create functioning product deliverables, also called potentially shippable product increments. 

The work needed after a sprint or series of sprints to release the product, is sometimes referred to as the post-game phase. 

A scrum task board on a wall or whiteboard

At the start of a new Scrum project, some initial planning and design must take place in order to define a project goal and product backlog for the project. 

Once the product owner has compiled project requirements, the development team reviews the backlog and creates a high-level design for the product to be developed. 

The game phase is where the core Scrum practices exist and where the bulk of the work is done. The development team plans each sprint, meets regularly, and creates functioning deliverables. And at the end of each sprint, it delivers the results to the customer, or a customer representative, for review. The process is iterative, with a product developed incrementally over multiple sprints. 

Sample sprint backlog

During the course of a sprint, the members of a Scrum team meet to discuss task progress and any issues that are preventing tasks from being completed.  

Ongoing testing and the adaptation based on test results is a key principle of most agile methodologies, including Scrum. During the game phase of the Scrum development process, this principle is implemented in two ways – through unit testing and sprint reviews.

After each sprint review meeting, the Scrum Master conducts a sprint retrospective with the development team to discuss how the sprint went and how it could have been improved. This helps the team formulate best practices it can apply during the next sprint, in keeping with the agile principle of continuous improvement. 

At any point in a project, it's important to know how the project is progressing. That way, team members can make necessary adjustments – and other stakeholders can verify that everything is on track. Scrum teams use various highly visual tools to track their progress during each sprint. These include burndown charts and various progress charts. 

A burndown chart

As well as burndown charts, a Scrum team may use various progress charts - to track its progress in completing the tasks in each sprint

Both burndown charts and progress charts let you compare actual and estimated values, and both provide a quick, highly visual way to track progress. 

When practicing Scrum we can make the sprint backlog visible by putting it on a Scrum task board. Team members update the task board continuously throughout the sprint; if someone thinks of a new task (“Test the snark code on Windows 8.1”), she writes a new card and puts it on the wall.

As well as charts, you can use various metrics to track and report on the progress of a Scrum project. All visual ways to track progress, within the sprint or on project level, are called progress monitors.

Metrics that you can use to track the progress of a project include velocity, standards violation, business value delivered, number of defects per iteration, number of stories, level of automation, and number of tests. 

Course project (optional)

Course wrap up and conclusions.

Agile transition roadmap

This course covers the key exam concepts of Kanban, work in progress or WIP, lead time, cycle time, and Little's Law. You'll also learn about Agile Team Spaces, sharing the product vision, and identifying and reducing defects. 

In Lean project management waste, or the Japanese term Muda, is defined as any activity or process that doesn't add value to a product but does add cost. Lean's original Seven Forms of Waste include transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overprocessing, overproduction, and defects. The new eighth form of waste is skills or non-utilized talent. 

A Kanban board is a tool that agile teams often use to visualize workflow through a system. While Kanban principles are often used in IT and software development, they can be helpful in any industry.

Example of a Kanban Board

In a Pull-based system, the customer demand creates what is called pull. Production or development relies on pull rather than on complicated market forecast to determine how many products to deliver.

In lean project management, one of the key concepts is process improvement. Lead time and cycle time are two important metrics that help determine how lean a process is. In other words, how much of the time dedicated to creating a product is value added. 

Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy that focuses on reducing waste and implementing a flow-based production line rather than a batch and queue method. It's aimed at reducing costs and improving overall customer value. 

In order to maintain a stable process with minimal chaos organizations should attempt to minimize work in progress or WIP in their processes. One way to do this is by setting WIP limits. WIP limits help to reduce bottlenecks, improve the rate of throughput, and control the workload levels of project team members. 

Stakeholder engagement is a fundamental part of project management. It's important to be able to express the product vision to stakeholders in order to gain support in common understanding about the product requirements. The product owner often collaborates with other key stakeholders to develop a product vision. 

With today's modern technology there are a variety of tools to bring teams together virtually. 

Agile teams achieve efficiency by leveraging many of the tools from Lean Management, but also by valuing individuals and interactions. 

In this exercise, you'll demonstrate that you can identify characteristics of waste
recognize the relationship between PCE variables identify characteristics of Agile environments 

This course covers the key exam concepts of Kanban, work in progress or WIP, lead time, cycle time, and Little's Law. You'll also learn about Agile Team Spaces, sharing the product vision, and identifying and reducing defects.

PMI Certification Info

After completing 'The Agile Certified Practitioner Training Program (PMI-ACP)', it's time to evaluate your readiness! Dive into the 'Agile Certified Practitioner: PMI - ACP Exam Mastery' on Udemy and ensure you're fully prepared to conquer the exam with confidence.

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