What is Agile/Scrum

Scrum is a software development process. In today’s rapid world stakeholders want immediate return on their investments. They don’t want to wait for longer periods to get full featured product. As a result, nowadays new software development and testing framework is catching momentum i.e. Scrum approach.

In scrum, projects are divided in small features to be developed and tested in specific time-frames called as sprint (small cycles). Features should get developed and tested in specified small time-frames.  This agile scrum team is handled by scrum master.

Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for projects and products or application development. Scrum has become more and more popular software development and testing framework among organizations. Many small to large sized IT companies have started to embrace Scrum framework, as this can create excellent quality products in less time than other traditional methodologies. This framework can save companies both time and money.
Scrum:
Scrum has been used to develop complex products in incremental approach to optimize predictability and control risk. Scrum is also known as Agile or Extreme Programming (XP).
Scrum Terminology:

• Product Owner, The Product Owner is the one and only person responsible for managing the product backlog and ensuring the value of the work the Team performs. This person maintains the product backlog and ensures that it is visible to everyone. Everyone knows what items have the highest priority, so everyone knows what will be worked on.
• Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that the scrum team adheres to scrum values, practices, and rules. The scrum master teaches the scrum team by coaching and by leading it to be more productive and produce higher quality products. The scrum master should never be the product owner
• Scrum Team, which does the work. The team consists of cross functional knowledge developers and testers with all the skills to turn the product owner‟s requirements into a potentially releasable piece of the product by the end of the Sprint. Teams are also self-organizing. Each team member applies his or her expertise to all of the problems
• Product Backlog: The requirements or user stories for the product that the team(s) is developing are listed in the product backlog. The product owner is responsible for the product backlog, its contents, its availability, and its prioritization. The backlog is dynamic in that it constantly changes to identify what the product needs to be appropriate, competitive, and useful.
• Sprint Planning Meeting: The sprint planning meeting is when the iteration is planned. It is time-boxed to eight hours for a one month sprint. In this meeting select the product backlog, and set a sprint goal. The sprint goal is an objective that will be met through the implementation of the product backlog
• Sprint is iteration or cycle. Sprints are time-boxed. During the sprint, the scrum master ensures that no changes are made that would affect the sprint goal. Both team composition and quality goals remain constant throughout the sprint. Sprints contain and consist of the sprint planning meeting, the testing related work, the sprint review, and the sprint retrospective. Sprints occur one after another, with no time in between sprints.
• Sprint Review At the end of the sprint, a sprint review meeting is held. This is a four hour time-boxed meeting for one month sprints. During the sprint review, the scrum team and stakeholders collaborate about what was just done. Based on that and changes to the product backlog during the sprint, they collaborate about what are the next things that could be done. This is an informal meeting, with the presentation of the functionality intended to foster collaboration about what to do next.
• Sprint Retrospective Meeting After the sprint review and prior to the next sprint planning meeting, the scrum team has a sprint retrospective meeting. The purpose of the retrospective is to inspect how the last sprint went in regards to people, relationships, process and tools. The inspection should identify and prioritize the major items that went well and those items that-if done differently-could make things even better.
• Daily Scrum Meeting: Each team meets daily for a 15-minute status meeting called the daily scrum. The daily scrum is at the same time and same place throughout the sprints. During the meeting, each team member explains:
•   Accomplished since the last meeting§
•   Going to do before the next meeting§
•   Any obstacles or bottle necks§
•  The scrum master ensures that the team has the meeting. The team is  responsible for conducting the daily scrum.
• Scrum MOM: Scrum minutes of meeting to be maintained by the team to verify is there any open items are available and who is the responsible person to finish that task for next scrum meeting.
• Scrum Artifacts: includes the product backlog, sprint plan, sprint test cases, sprint test execution report, the release burn down, the sprint backlog, and the sprint burn down.
• Sprint Backlog: The amount of work not done during in the sprint need to keep track in sprint backlog. The sprint backlog is a highly visible, real-time picture of the work that the team plans to accomplish during the sprint.
• Sprint Burn down Chart is a graph of the amount of sprint backlog work remaining in a sprint across time in the sprint.
• Release Burn down Chart is a graph records the sum of remaining product backlog estimated effort across time. The estimated effort is in whatever unit of work the Scrum team and organization have decided upon. The units of time are usually sprints.

Advantages of Agile Methodology:

• More clients and stakeholders focused.
• Fixed time lines for entire iteration
• Self-organized teams
• Every day communication over the teams
• Continuous regression test will performed in each sprint

Disadvantages of Agile Methodolog

• Less documentation work