Communication becomes exponentially harder and more complex as team members increase. More time and effort is spent on communications for larger teams. This is true for team members as well as the Scrum Master. Keeping communication effort down is important since this can start to eat away at productivity. If a team is too small, communication between the team may be easier, but collaboration may become harder. As a Scrum Master, you should consider the nature of the work and what is needed for the team when deciding a team size. This will allow you to keep the team and project going in a productive, efficient manner.
Forming the Scrum Team
Scrum is a framework that encourages delivery of potentially shippable product increments every 2-6 weeks. The work is developed and delivered by the scrum team which is composed of a product owner, scrum master, and development team. In traditional project management or waterfall, the development phases – requirements analysis, coding, testing, and deployment – are done sequentially. Each development phase corresponds to a specific role. Business requirements come from business analysts and product owners; coding is done by developers; testing is executed by software testers, and deployment is made possible by release management professionals.
Traditionally, as all these steps are done in phases, the people working on each phase are people of the same role. For example, during development, all developers work together; during testing, testers interact with fellow testers. Once the code has been turned over, there is no actual interaction between testers and the developers. It is understood that since the phase has ended, the responsibility is handed over as well. In Agile Scrum, all phases are done in one sprint (which spans from 1-6 weeks). This means that all of the significant roles in delivering a potentially shippable product increment are brought together in one team called a scrum team. The scrum team is composed of 6-10 individuals – programmers, testers, business analysts, scrum master and a product owner – that possess the needed skills for development.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course:
Course Contents
Section 1: Agile Project Management
Section 2: Using the Agile Manifesto to Deliver Change
Section 3: The 12 Agile Principles
Section 4: The Agile Fundamentals
Section 5: The Declaration of Interdependence
Section 6: Agile Development Frameworks
Section 7: Introduction to Scrum
Section 8: Scrum Projects
Section 9: Scrum Project Roles
Section 10: Meet the Scrum Team
Section 11: Building the Scrum Team
Section 12: Scrum in Projects, Programs & Portfolios
Section 13: How to Manage an Agile Project
Section 14: Leadership Styles
Section 15: The Agile Project Life-cycle
Section 16: Business Justification with Agile
Section 17: Calculating the Benefits With Agile
Section 18: Quality in Agile
Section 19: Acceptance Criteria and the Prioritised Product Backlog
Section 20: Quality Management in Scrum
Section 21: Change in Scrum
Section 22: Integrating Change in Scrum
Section 23: Managing Change in Scrum
Section 24: Risk in Scrum
Section 25: Risk Assessment Techniques
Section 26: Initiating an Agile Project
Section 27: Forming the Scrum Team
Section 28: Epics and Personas
Section 29: Creating the Prioritised Product Backlog
Section 30: Conduct Release Planning
Section 31: The Project Business Case
Section 32: Planning in Scrum
Section 33: Scrum Boards
Section 34: Sprint Planning
Section 35: User Stories
Section 36: User Stories and Tasks
Section 37: The Sprint Backlog
Section 38: Implementation of Scrum
Section 39: The Daily Scrum
Section 40: The Product Backlog
Section 41: Scrum Charts
Section 42: Review and Retrospective
Section 43: Scrum of Scrums
Section 44: Validating a Sprint
Section 45: Retrospective Sprint
Section 46: Releasing the Product
Section 47: Project Retrospective
Section 48: The Communication Plan
Section 49: Formal Business Sign-off
Section 50: Scaling Scrum
Section 51: Stakeholders
Section 52: Programs and Portfolios