Crafting Quality Technovative Solutions
Agile Methodology
In the agile Scrum world, instead of providing complete, detailed descriptions of how everything that needs to be done on a project, much of it is left up to the Scrum software development team. This is because the team will know best how to solve the problem they are presented.
This is why in Scrum development, for example, a sprint planning meeting is described in terms of the desired outcome (a commitment to a set of features to be developed in the next sprint) instead of a set of Entry criteria, Task definitions, Validation criteria, Exit criteria (ETVX) and so on, as would be provided in most methodologies.
The primary artifact in Scrum development is, of course, the product itself. The Scrum model expects the team to bring the product or system to a potentially shippable state at the end of each Scrum sprint.
The product backlog is another artifact of Scrum. This is the complete list of the functionality that remains to be added to the product. The product owner prioritizes the backlog so the team always works on the most valuable features first.
Agile Methodology
The most popular and successful way to create a product backlog using Scrum methodology is to populate it with user stories, which are short descriptions of functionality described from the perspective of a user or customer.
In Scrum project management, on the first day of a sprint and during the planning meeting, team members create the sprint backlog. The sprint backlog can be thought of as the team’s to-do list for the sprint, whereas a product backlog is a list of features to be built (written in the form of user stories).
The sprint backlog is the list of tasks the team needs to perform in order to deliver the functionality it committed to deliver during the sprint.
Additional artifacts resulting from the Scrum agile methodology is the sprint burndown chart and release burndown chart. Burndown charts show the amount of work remaining either in a sprint or a release, and are an effective tool in Scrum software development to determine whether a sprint or release is on schedule to have all planned work finished by the desired date.
