Essential and Transparent Artifacts in Scrum to practice empiricism
Have you wondered what are Scrum Artifacts and how these bring transparency to work done by the scrum team?
If you’re looking to understand product backlog, sprint backlog, and Increment, this article will help you get an overview.
Scrum Artifacts help the Scrum teams and the stakeholders with information about the product under development and the activities undertaken in developing a product.
It contains all the critical information required during the product development stages covering To Do, Doing and Done. In addition, artifacts help in giving an accurate picture regarding sprint performance.
Scrum’s artifacts represent work that the Scrum team does to deliver value. They are there to maximize the transparency of essential information. Thus, everyone inspecting them has the same basis for adaptation.
Each artifact contains a commitment to ensure it provides information that enhances transparency and focus on measuring the progress:
- For the Product Backlog, it is the Product Goal.
- For the Sprint Backlog, it is the Sprint Goal.
- For the Increment, it is the Definition of Done.
These commitments exist to reinforce empiricism and the Scrum values for the Scrum Team and their stakeholders.
There are three essential Artifacts in Scrum Framework.
1. Product Backlog
The Product Backlog is an emergent, ordered list of work to build and improve the product. It is the single source of work undertaken by the Scrum Team that means it includes everything such as user story, task, spike, enablers and bugs etc. So, in simple language, the product backlog is a to-do list for the scrum team.
The scrum team continuously refine the product backlog to prepare it for upcoming sprints. Product Backlog Refinement is an act of adding details to each backlog that may include acceptance criteria, estimates and business values. Product backlog items are considered ready if backlog items are small to fit within a sprint, estimated and ordered.
The Product Owner is accountable for Product Backlog management, which includes:
- Developing and explicitly communicating the Product Goal;
- Creating and communicating Product Backlog items;
- Ordering Product Backlog items; and,
- Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible and understood.
2. Sprint Backlog.
The sprint backlog is the plan for a sprint created and managed by developers. Developers pull the product backlog items in agreement with the product owner to forecast what possibly can be done by the end of a sprint. Typically, product backlog items consist of user stories, spikes, enablers and technical tasks such as architecture and framework design.
The Sprint Backlog is composed of
- The Sprint Goal. It helps everyone understand the importance of Sprint and why we are here?
- Forecast for the Sprint. The set of Product Backlog items selected for the Sprint helps everyone get an idea of what possibly will get done by the end of Sprint?
- An Actionable plan. It is a highly visible, real-time picture of the Developers’ work to achieve the Sprint Goal.
The third Artifact is Increment.
An Increment is done work within the Sprint. The entire Scrum Team is accountable for creating a valuable, useful Increment for every Sprint.
Product Increment is the total of all the product backlog items completed during a sprint and the value of all the increments from the previous sprints. After completion, the Product Increment considers as “Done” based on the Definition of Done. Therefore, the moment a Product Backlog item meets the Definition of Done, an Increment is born.
The term is self-explanatory as the increments increase with every Sprint, hence the name Product Increment. The Product Increment is the sum of all the product backlog items completed during a sprint or a project.
The Potentially Releasable Product Increment is the value delivered to the customer through the Product Backlog items completed during a sprint.
The potentially Releasable product increment must ideally be free of bugs and good quality, but the quality may vary according to customers’ requirements. From the customer’s point of view, the product release is entirely dependent on the number of sprints to be completed for the Product Increment or Potentially Releasable Product Increment to be released in the market.
And that was all about Scrum Artifacts. Visit the Agilemania website to learn more about Scrum and the essential elements of the Scrum Framework.
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