What is a Scrum methodology, when is it used, and what are the benefits of using the method in Software Development?
Each organization uses a method, practices, or principles to get better results, satisfy their customers or achieve their values. As a worker in a software development company, Preezma, I know how important it is to deliver products with high quality, responsibility, and customer satisfaction.
In this article, I will speak about one of the most used methodologies of Agile: the Scrum method that our company applies. The article will cover essential points:
- Introduction
- What is Agile?
- What is Scrum?
- Difference between Agile and Scrum
- Benefits of Using Scrum in Software Development
- When to Use Scrum?
- The Importance of Scrum in Software Development
- Conclusion
Introduction
As we know, software projects use clearly defined processes for delivering high-quality software that is called the software development life cycle (SDLC). The latter has two popular models; waterfall and agile.
The former is a traditional model to develop engineering systems. As it is a linear approach, tasks of one phase need to be reviewed and verified before moving to another stage. While, Agile is an incremental method that breaks down development work into small increments and focuses on responding to change, collaboration, and results.
Our company is Agile too, and we use Scrum for high-quality and incremental delivery of our projects. We are satisfied with the result as Scrum is divided into short but manageable increments that focus on customer satisfaction. We think that while delivering big products, Agile works better than any other approach.
Let’s see the work process of waterfall and agile in developing products.
When delivering a big project, the waterfall takes too much time from companies because it divides SDLC into distinct phases: analysis and design, coding and unit testing, etc. The next step cannot be completed if the previous phase has not been done. All requirements for the project are decided from the start of the project; hence, changes cannot be done, and customer engagement will be limited. Any changes after the beginning of the project will counteract the original plan and will need a restart. Thus, big projects require time and cost in the waterfall model.
Whereas, Agile approach and precisely Scrum method proceed step by step while developing big products. The planning takes less time, and the overall process is at a minimal cost. The SDLC is divided into small time-boxed iterations and sprints that last up to 2–4 weeks. At the beginning of a sprint, tasks are prioritized based on the collaboration with the customer. During the sprint, changes are welcome. When the sprint ends, the team delivers a product by considering customer feedback and team collaboration. Thus, the team gets used to the iterative work process. More in detail, you will find in the rest of the article, which focuses explicitly on the Scrum methodology.
Now let’s get into focusing on Agile and Scrum.
Many people, when hearing the word Scrum, always interchange it with Agile. And some of them do not know how they differ from each other. Sometimes, people even misuse the concepts of these tools naming agile as a methodology. Before getting deep into the two terms, let me give you a small summary of Agile and Scrum.
What is Agile?
Agile is an iterative software development approach that provides fastness and agility in delivering value to their customers. Small and frequent increments during planning helps the team gather feedback from their customers, make changes quicker and at minimal cost. As requirements and plans are reviewed frequently, the team has a natural tendency to respond to changes. This philosophy focuses on satisfying customers’ needs, and it provides a new approach of planning and delivering the projects. Agile differs from all other processes by emphasizing mechanisms that would provide change management of delivering products. Open communication, trust, and collaboration are among team members of agile. Self-organized and cross-functional team decides how to do the work to get it done.
Behind Agile philosophy, there is a document that contains all key values and principles of agile helping teams work more efficiently. The document is Agile Manifesto which has 4 values and 12 principles (pic. 1 & 2).
The 4 values help agile methodologies to develop and deliver high-quality products (pic. 1).
The 12 principles describe a customer-centered culture where change is welcome. The principles also aim to make development advance in line with business needs (pic. 2).
Agile is not a group of ceremonies, instead, it is a set of methodologies that aim to strengthen feedback cycles and provide continuous improvement.
Agile methodologies look for customer satisfaction by delivering enhanced software, keeping up regular meetings with customers for feedback, and focusing on team collaboration. The methods rely on a software development cycle: planning, execution and final delivery through which not only software evolves but also it becomes easier to resolve the bugs.
Agile has a number of software development methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, Crystal, Lean Development, and so on. The methodologies rely on the idea that requirements and solutions develop by the collaboration of self-organizing and cross-functional teams. Each agile methodology uses 4 values and 12 principles in different ways.
Today we are going to focus on the Scrum method and its benefits.
What is Scrum?
According to the Scrum Guide
“Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems”
There are four formal events that occur in Scrum: Sprint Planning, Daily Standup, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective. These events happen within a sprint, which is a fixed-length event of one month or less. Each event has its value and importance (pic. 3).
Scrum’s four events work due to Scrum’s pillars called transparency, inspection, and adaptation (pic. 4).
To use Scrum successfully, the Scrum Team should live in five Scrum values: commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect (pic. 5).
And last but not least, Scrum method with its events, pillars, and values cannot be done without a Scrum Team (pic. 6).
Now you know the basics of the Scrum method (pic. 7).
After a brief introduction of Agile and Scrum, let us finalize the difference between these two.
Difference Between Agile and Scrum
As you have learned above, Agile is a philosophy that has several methodologies in it, one of which is the Scrum. Imagine Agile as a Vegetable and Scrum as a Carrot.
The Agile approach provides the fastness and agility of the work, and the Scrum method generates value through adaptive solutions to complex issues. I think you got the point.
Now let us go deep into the Scrum method and examine its benefits in software development companies and organizations.
What are the Benefits of using Scrum in Software Development?
There are many benefits that Scrum has, and as mentioned above, it has several essential features. However, in this part of the article, I would separate four main benefits of using Scrum in IT and software companies (pic. 8).
Time Management and Speed
Through Scrum, the team becomes much more self-organized. Self-organized members know in which ways to do their work rather than waiting for someone to tell them how to do it. Scrum Master helps the team become more self-managed and plan and control their job activities on their own.
Managing tasks and planning for the next steps is an essential tool that ensures time and money management. Sprint planning is necessary to achieve the initiated goal result, and a 15-minute daily standup also is a must. The latter ensures that the work process is going in the right direction as planned at the beginning.
Scrum helps to release projects 40% faster to the customers.
This agile method is based on empiricism and lean thinking. The former affirms that knowledge is coming from experience based on observations. While, lean thinking saves time and concentrates on what is essential. Thus, Scrum manages time focusing on essential values.
Our company Preezma uses Scrum Workflow, which contains all the necessary events for a better result and time management. Through Scrum, our team manages time effectively and delivers products more quickly.
High quality
Scrum uses an incremental approach to consider risk. This method engages people who have all the necessary skills and experience to complete the work and share their skills.
The software team can get feedback from customers through direct collaboration with the customer, and they can easily update the system, which improves product quality.
The agile method is responding to change, and the time scale is consistent. For this, the Product Owner’s role is essential, who understands the concept and discusses decisions adding greater values.
During Sprint, the Scrum Team tries to complete all the tasks for business value. Each task gets priority status as urgent, high, normal, lowest or from 1 to 10 points.
The picture below (pic. 9) shows how Preezma uses Scrum with all key events, through which our company releases products faster and with better quality. During Sprint, we take manageable tasks. We do regular testing and reviews of the developed software or working process and our mistakes become less, and product quality becomes higher and better.
Flexibility
Scrum methodology is very flexible. In the case of the waterfall software development method, a linear approach of project management, team members create a clear plan and stick to it. After completion of one step, developers cannot go back to the previous step.
Whereas in Scrum, flexibility and productivity are present so that when a developer makes a mistake, he/she can go back in the stages and react to the error quickly.
The flexibility comes from the fact that Scrum responds to changes rapidly, and business value is pre-planned with the team.
Customer Satisfaction
As we have learned above, Scrum is flexible, manages time, and delivers high-quality products and therefore, it provides customer satisfaction. Through flexible development strategy, there is a freedom to change software terms and processes based on customer interests and requirements.
Our company is a customer-centered and outsourcing organization, and we work with our customers as one team (pic 10).
Now let’s understand how the usage of Scrum helps us to satisfy our customers.
According to the article called “The Impact of Scrum on Customer Satisfaction: An Empirical Study,” there are critical factors for customer satisfaction and project success: time, quality, goals, communication and transparency, agility, and benchmark.
We can refer to each point in brief so that you can see how Scrum meets the factors.
- Time: Scrum is based on small iterations, and through its key events, the Scrum team meets all the deadlines and delivers the product in an anticipated time.
- Goals: Scrum addresses customer needs related to defined goals because it encourages frequent stakeholders’ participation and collaboration.
- Quality: Regular inspections are one of the best tools for quality within a software development project, and as I mentioned above, one of the Scrum pillars is inspection.
- Communication and Transparency: Regular communications are essential to show stakeholders how the work progresses, and Scrum is transparent, as mentioned above.
- Agility: Agile approach is essential for valuable software delivery and fast response to changes and, as customers want fast-moving projects, they also need agility, which is a Scrum factor.
- Benchmark: As we know, it’s expected that an organization hires a development company to create a product and makes a comparison between suppliers to get which one is better to hire. Customers can choose an organization based on project results compared to other companies’ project results. We believe that Scrum can provide higher rates of customer satisfaction by comparing projects of two specific organizations with each other.
When to use Scrum in Building Products?
Below (pic. 11), you can see all the factors related to when you can use Scrum in your products.
Scrum helps to know how to build a product and what to do with it. If you adapt Agile to your needs rather than adapting your needs to Agile, it starts to lose its value. Don’t adopt it, instead be adapted.
Besides, Scrum is based on the experience of your resources in agile and your expertise; if you do not have both of them, then do not use the method as it would cause a lack of energy and time.
In the Scrum Guide, it says.
“Changing the core design or ideas of Scrum, leaving out elements, or not following the rules of Scrum, covers up problems and limits the benefits of Scrum, potentially even rendering it useless.”
The Importance of Scrum in Software Development
Most often, Scrum is used by software and engineering development. Scrum is essential in software development because
- It responds to change
- It delivers better quality products
- It satisfies customers
- It controls risks
- It delivers product faster
This video shows how Scrum is awesome and mainly why developer teams use the framework.
“By adopting an agile mindset and providing improved engagement, collaboration, transparency, and adaptability via Scrum’s values, roles, events, and artifacts, the results were excellent.”
― Scott M. Graffius
Let’s review the 2020 survey of the 14th Annual State of Agile Report. The latter shows that one of the most common agile methodologies is Scrum (pic. 12).
Here you can see the organizations that use Agile principles and practices (pic. 13).
And here you can see the reasons for using the Agile approach (pic. 14).
Conclusion
To conclude, the Agile approach is efficient for companies, and it has several methodologies, one of which is Scrum.
As a software development company, Preezma uses Scrum methodology and not only delivers products with high quality and high speed but also creates autonomy in the team and motivates each team member.
If you want our help, contact us because we are a customer-centered organization that meets deadlines and delivers high-quality platforms.
It’s now your turn to make your company awesome through Scrum.
And last but not least, in the video below, you can review Scrum events, artifacts, how the method works, and much more.
See you soon!
