Introduction To Agile : Scrum Project Management

A downloadable glossary of the key Scrum project management terms used throughout the course, sprint, daily scrum, product backlog, sprint planning, sprint review, sprint retrospective, planning poker, product owner, scrum master, story point, user story, Kanban, and burndown chart, to help you follow the rest of the training.

This lecture defines Scrum, the Agile framework created by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, and gives an overview of how a Scrum team works: the three roles, product owner, scrum master, and developers, the product backlog of user stories, and the sprint cycle with its four events. A concrete fitness app example walks through a full sprint from planning to review and retrospective.

This lecture presents the three pillars of Scrum, transparency, inspection, and adaptation, and the five Scrum values, focus, openness, respect, courage, and commitment, using the mnemonic FORCE. It explains how these principles shape collaboration within a self-managing, cross-functional Scrum team and set the foundation for the roles covered next.

A companion resource listing popular Scrum board and project management tools, such as Trello, Jira, Yodiz, and ScrumWise, to help teams put the values of transparency, inspection, and adaptation into practice.

This lecture details the responsibilities of the Product Owner, the voice of the customer in a Scrum team, in charge of creating, prioritizing, and maintaining the product backlog to maximize the value delivered by the team at every sprint.

This lecture explains the multiple roles of the Scrum Master: coach for the team and the organization, facilitator of Scrum events, and protector of the team from external distractions during a sprint. It clarifies what a Scrum Master is not, not the team's boss, not a secretary, and not an intermediary between the product owner and developers.

This lecture covers the role of developers in Scrum, the cross-functional team members responsible for turning product backlog items into a working product increment each sprint, planning their own work, and meeting the team's Definition of Done.

This lecture explains the two defining characteristics of a Scrum team, cross-functional and self-managing, and why teams should stay under about ten people to keep decision making fast and productive. A real example shows how splitting a large team by functional area, while keeping a shared product backlog and product owner, restored productivity.

This lecture identifies the internal and external stakeholders of a Scrum project, marketing, sales, managers, users, clients, and sponsors, and explains how they interact with the Scrum team, particularly during the sprint review, without being part of the team itself.

A practical exercise to map your own Scrum team: who plays the product owner, scrum master, and developer roles, and which internal and external stakeholders are involved in your project, applying the roles and stakeholder concepts from the previous lectures.

This lecture introduces the sprint, the heart of Scrum project management, a fixed-length cycle of one month or less during which all the work toward the sprint goal happens. It explains the rules that keep a sprint stable: a fixed goal, fixed quality standards, and the fact that only the product owner can cancel a sprint.

This lecture explains sprint planning, the event that opens each sprint, where the Scrum team answers three questions: why this sprint matters, what can be done during it, and how the work will get done. It details the product owner's and developers' respective roles in selecting and committing to product backlog items.

This lecture presents the daily scrum, or daily stand-up, a 15-minute event for developers to synchronize, surface blockers, and adapt their plan for the next 24 hours. It shares practical techniques, including the three questions method and the benefits of standing up for a short, focused meeting.

This lecture covers the sprint review, the event where the Scrum team demonstrates the work completed during the sprint to stakeholders and clients, gathers feedback, and discusses future adaptations to the product backlog. It explains why the sprint review should be a working session, not a one-way presentation.

This lecture presents the sprint retrospective, the closing Scrum event where the team reflects on how it worked, not on the product itself, to identify what went well, what did not, and what can be improved. It walks through the five typical steps of a retrospective session, from icebreaker to action plan.

A companion resource with additional retrospective techniques and online tools to help Scrum Masters facilitate engaging, productive sprint retrospectives with their team.

This bonus lecture teaches the speed boat retrospective, a popular facilitation technique using a sailboat drawing, island, wind, anchor, and rocks as metaphors for the team's goal, drivers, obstacles, and future risks, to make sprint retrospectives more visual and engaging.

A practical exercise to plan the cadence of your own Scrum events, sprint length, daily scrum time, and when sprint planning, review, and retrospective will take place, applying the event definitions covered in this section.

This lecture explains backlog refinement, or grooming, the recurring session, not an official Scrum event, where the team clarifies, estimates, and prepares product backlog items so they are ready to enter the next sprint. It details who attends, how often it happens, and how it connects to the Definition of Ready.

This lecture explains how to organize a product backlog using different levels of granularity, themes, epics, user stories, and tasks, with a concrete e-commerce wishlist example. It also covers spikes for technical investigation and how bugs should be tracked directly in the product backlog for transparency.

A practical exercise to structure a real product backlog into themes, epics, user stories, and tasks, applying the organization principles covered in the previous lecture to a project of your choice.

This lecture teaches the standard format for writing a clear, concise user story, a title, the sentence template as a user I want so that, and acceptance criteria, so that developers, clients, and stakeholders share the same understanding of a feature.

This lecture presents the Definition of Ready, the set of criteria a user story must meet to be considered ready for development, such as a clear title, an estimate, and defined acceptance criteria. It explains how this practice, built collaboratively by the Scrum team, improves the quality of the product backlog.

This lecture presents the INVEST method, Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable, a checklist to evaluate the quality of a user story before it enters a sprint, with concrete examples distinguishing a real user story from a technical task.

This lecture presents the MoSCoW method, Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won't have, a simple technique for the product owner and stakeholders to prioritize a large product backlog and identify the Minimum Viable Product.

This lecture explains the Definition of Done, the set of technical and functional quality criteria a product backlog item must meet to be considered finished and counted as a product increment. It covers how the Definition of Done is set at the organization or team level and reviewed over time.

A companion resource presenting the DOD Kards technique, a card game to help a Scrum team collaboratively build its own Definition of Done by sorting quality criteria into yes, later, and no categories.

This lecture introduces relative estimation with story points, a unit of measure for the overall effort to implement a user story, covering difficulty, workload, risk, and dependencies, and explains why estimation is optional but widely used in Scrum teams.

This lecture explains planning poker, the most common Scrum estimation technique, using a Fibonacci-based card deck to estimate user stories collectively. It walks through a full session, presenting the story, voting simultaneously, and discussing extreme estimates until the team converges.

This lecture presents two alternative estimation techniques, the bucket system, which uses Fibonacci-based containers to quickly sort a large number of user stories, and T-shirt sizing, which uses simple size categories, XS to XL, for a fast, informal way to estimate a large backlog.

This lecture presents the NoEstimate movement, an approach some Scrum teams adopt to skip numerical estimation and adapt as they go, explaining the reasoning behind it and the organizational maturity it requires to work well.

A practical exercise to select and apply the estimation technique, planning poker, bucket system, T-shirt sizing, or no estimate, best suited to your team and project, based on the techniques covered in this section.

This lecture explains velocity, the key performance indicator that measures the amount of work a Scrum team completes per sprint, how to calculate it, and why comparing the velocity of different teams is a common and misleading management mistake.

This lecture presents the burndown chart, a graph tracking the remaining work in a sprint over time, and explains how comparing the actual progress curve to the ideal line helps the team spot delays early and adjust during the sprint.

This lecture presents the burn up chart, which tracks completed work against total planned scope, and explains how it differs from the burndown chart, helping product owners and project managers understand scope changes and forecast a project's completion sprint.

This lecture presents the cumulative flow diagram, a graph showing tasks to do, in progress, and done over time, and explains how to spot bottlenecks when the in-progress area keeps growing, a common sign that work in progress needs to be limited.

A practical exercise to select which Scrum performance indicators, velocity, burndown chart, burn up chart, or cumulative flow diagram, are most relevant for tracking your own project, based on the metrics covered in this section.

A complete worked example applying Scrum project management to a library management system project, from forming the Scrum team and running a sprint zero to writing the first product backlog items as user stories, illustrating every concept covered in the course.

A link to the official Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, the reference document for anyone preparing the Professional Scrum Master certification or wanting to go deeper into the official Scrum framework.

A closing message thanking you for completing the Scrum project management course, with a reminder of the key concepts, roles, events, and estimation and tracking techniques covered, to help you apply Scrum in your own team.

Contact details and social media links to stay in touch with Jamal Lazaar and get support for applying the Scrum project management techniques covered in this course.

A bonus resource offering access to other courses by Jamal Lazaar on Agile, Kanban, and project management to continue developing your project management skills.

Information on how to claim your certificate of completion for this Scrum project management course, useful to showcase your Agile project management skills, including as preparation toward the Professional Scrum Master certification.