Scrum.org, the Scrum Alliance and Mountain Goat Software make it sound easy. Tuning Agile to actually deliver takes years.
A full-length primer on tuning Agile and Scrum to actually deliver software — from the custom development side of the practice.
Each chapter starts the video at that point.
Not available for this video.
Waterfall runs a project through five phases in sequence, requirements, design, build, test and release, with a fence between each, so the customer sees working software only at the end. Agile delivers working software in short cycles and puts the customer inside the loop, so requirements can change as the product is learned. The video walks through why waterfall failed and what agile changed, using a 1999 requirements document as the example.
The product owner, who owns the backlog and decides what is built and in what order; the scrum master, who runs the ceremonies and removes obstacles; and the development team, which estimates, commits to a sprint and builds the increment. The video covers the roles alongside the ceremonies: sprint planning, the daily standup, the review and the retrospective, and the burndown and velocity that track them.
Stories are sized in story points, a relative measure of effort rather than hours, and the team's velocity is the number of points it completes per sprint. Sprints are loaded against that velocity, and a release is estimated by dividing the remaining points by it. The video's position is that estimation is a conversation rather than a number, and it shows how a fixed budget and a fixed deadline are handled on top of it.
With a written definition of done that every story meets before it leaves the board: code complete, unit tested, passed QA, and meeting the release standards for defects. The video covers the scrum board columns from to do through in progress and QA, what happens when a test fails and a story is reopened, and the environments a change passes through from development to staging to production.
We design, build, integrate and operate AI-driven, platform-agnostic integrated business solutions for operationally complex companies. Start with a conversation; we will tell you if we are a fit.
