Implementing Scrum Using ZenTao

Scrum is all about increment and iterations. It attached great importance to communications among team members.

Scrum, not like Waterfall which requires everything to be ready at the beginning of the project, can be implemented when the goal of the project and a few user stories have been confirmed.

Scrum team usually has no more than 10 members, including product owner, scrum master and scrum team.

Product owner: "responsible for defining Stories and prioritizing the Team Backlog to streamline the execution of program priorities while maintaining the conceptual and technical integrity of the Features or components for the team. " ¹
Scrum master: "responsible for ensuring the team lives agile values and principles and follows the processes and practices that the team agreed they would use." ²
Scrum team: Dev team and QA team.

Steps to do Scrum

Step 1 Brainstorming

If product owner understands user stories, brainstorming can be skipped. Stories have to be made clear from the beginning of the development. Product owner could ask tech team and users for advice and wrote a table of advice collected.

Step 2 PO filters the advice in the table and summaries the core stories.

Once stories are confirmed, Scrum master prepares PRD (product requirement document). This is the same as the documentation in Waterfall. PRD must be written by Scrum master and product owner and include business logic and features and workflow, etc.

Step 3 Workload estimation

Quantify workload, including prototype, logo, UI, frontend, etc. Break down work as small as possible, and the smallest workload should not be over 16 hours. Then estimate the total hours of the project.

Write each task on a sticky note and stick it to a whiteboard which is divided into three columns,

（1）to do（2）in progress（3）done

Step 4 Sprint

After quantifying the workload, prioritize tasks and create sprints. Work on one sprint at a time.

Sprint：Each sprint is independent. The priority of sprints go as main feature, subordinate features small feature, and the last sprint s usually to fix bugs.
Sprint：Scrum master knows how many hours have been used and how much work have been done each day, because all task and workload have been quantified. and updated in Burndown charts, through which the progress of tasks and the number of hours are clearly shown.
Sprint：In Burndown charts, man-hour must be recorded no matter whether the task is done or not.
Bugs：Each sprint should go through QA. Try to involve the team in testing. If too many bugs are found in QA, start a new sprint to fix them.
Daily standup meeting：Key points: stand up, every day, no more than 15 mins. Three questions should be touched at the meeting（1）What has been done?（2）What will be done today?（3）Any problems?

Step 5 Review

Product owner and stakeholders will review the product. If there is anything needs to be improved, product owner could create a bug sprint for it.

Notes

SCRUM has cons which are the high demand for the team.Team members should be capable of what they are doing and trust each other. If anything goes wrong, they will try to fix it, rather than just shifting responsibility.
If it is the first that your team uses Scrum, there will be problems. BE PATIENT AND WORK IT OUT.