agile – Scriptingthewhy.com

Why You Need to Know Scrum for Agile Success

Key Takeaways

Scrum is an Agile framework that emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and continuous improvement in software development.
Traditional Waterfall methods were often too rigid to adapt to the rapid changes in the tech world.
Scrum operates in short iterations called Sprints (typically 2-4 weeks) with a focus on delivering specific features.
Key Scrum events include:
- Daily Scrums: Brief daily meetings for team progress updates.
- Sprint Reviews: Demonstrations of completed work to stakeholders.
- Sprint Retrospectives: Team reflections on the sprint and identification of improvement areas.
Key Scrum Roles:
- Product Owner: Defines the product vision and manages the product backlog.
- Scrum Master: Facilitates the team, removes impediments, and ensures adherence to Scrum principles.
- Development Team: A self-organizing team responsible for delivering the product increment.
Scrum has applications beyond software development, including product development, project management, and education.
The future of Scrum involves:
- Integration with other Agile frameworks.
- Increased emphasis on data-driven decision-making.
- A stronger focus on individual and team well-being.
Resources for learning about Scrum: Online courses, books, and certifications.
Understanding Scrum provides valuable insights into modern software development and develops highly sought-after skills in the tech world.

AI-generated image. “Guys, I think we might want to try scrum this go around.”

Come one, come all! Welcome back again to another- ‘read this while you wait either on or in an elevator.’ Again, I don’t know what my reads do while reading these scripts but feel free to me know in the comment section below. We have that there for a reason. Make like someone filled with hopes and dreams and start using them. Start using the comment section is all I’m saying. Okay, moving right along. Have you ever wondered, “Whose your daddy?” In many other fields, everyone has a version of a “work daddy”. They might go by other names such as; foreman, supervisor, manager, pimp, and even house mom. Don’t ask about that last one. Google search at your own risk. However, today we’re going to be talking about the inner workings of what makes our daddy in the information technology world, Scrum daddy. Well, the term is Scrum Master, but Scrum Daddy sounds so much safer.

Diving Deep into Scrum: A Guide for Tech Enthusiasts

So, you’re a tech enthusiast, fascinated by the inner workings of software development? You’ve probably heard whispers of “Agile,” “Scrum,” and “sprints,” but maybe you’re still a bit hazy on what it all means. Fear not, fellow techie! This script will break down Scrum, a popular Agile framework, and how it shapes the world of software development.

The Age of Agile: Why Traditional Methods Cracked

Imagine building a skyscraper without a blueprint, just winging it as you go. Sounds chaotic, right? That’s kind of how traditional software development used to be. Waterfall, the old guard, involved lengthy planning phases followed by rigid execution. But in the fast-paced tech world, things change rapidly. Customer needs evolve, new technologies emerge, and unexpected challenges arise. Waterfall, with its rigid structure, often struggled to keep up.

Enter Agile, a collection of iterative and incremental approaches. Agile emphasizes flexibility, customer collaboration, and continuous improvement. Scrum, a prominent Agile framework, provides a structured approach within this flexible environment.

AI-generated image. “So, scrum is like being on a sports team? I was never good at sports. Just when I thought I could get away.”

Scrum: The Heart of Agile

Think of Scrum as a high-performance team sport. It’s all about:

Sprints: Short, time-boxed iterations (usually 2-4 weeks) where the team focuses on delivering a specific set of features.
Daily Scrums: Brief daily stand-up meetings where team members share their progress, blockers, and plans for the day.
Sprint Reviews: Demonstrations of the completed work to stakeholders at the end of each sprint.
Sprint Retrospectives: A dedicated time for the team to reflect on the sprint, identify areas for improvement, and adjust their approach.

Key Roles in the Scrum Game

Product Owner: The voice of the customer, responsible for defining the product vision and managing the product backlog (a prioritized list of features).
Scrum Master: The facilitator and coach, ensuring the team adheres to Scrum principles and removes any impediments to their progress.
Development Team: A self-organizing, cross-functional team responsible for delivering the product increment.

AI-generated image. “Using agile to make this program was way better than waterfall. What were they thinking calling it waterfall anyway? Who uses water to make apps?”

Beyond Software: Scrum’s Wider Impact

While born in the software world, Scrum’s principles have proven valuable in diverse fields:

Product Development: From smartphones to self-driving cars, companies use Scrum to navigate the complexities of bringing innovative products to market.
Project Management: Whether it’s building a bridge or launching a marketing campaign, Scrum helps teams stay organized, adaptable, and focused on delivering value.
Education: Educators are exploring Scrum to enhance student engagement, foster collaboration, and improve learning outcomes.

The Future of Scrum: Continuous Evolution

Scrum is not a static methodology. It’s constantly evolving to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world. Expect to see further integration with other Agile frameworks, increased emphasis on data-driven decision making, and a stronger focus on individual and team well-being.

Ready to Dive Deeper?

If you’re a tech enthusiast eager to learn more about Scrum and Agile methodologies, there are plenty of resources available:

Online Courses: Platforms like Coursera, Udemy, and Pluralsight offer a wealth of courses on Agile and Scrum.
Books: Explore classic texts like “The Scrum Guide” and “Agile Estimating and Planning.”
Certifications: Consider pursuing certifications like the Professional Scrum Master (PSM) or Certified Scrum Master (CSM).

By understanding the principles of Scrum, you’ll gain valuable insights into the modern software development landscape and develop skills that are highly sought-after in today’s tech-driven world. So, embrace the Agile spirit, embrace the challenge, and get ready to build amazing things! And with all of that being said, stay hopeful, have dreams, and just know, that no matter what framework your Scrum Daddy has your back.

Love learning tech? Join our community of passionate minds! Share your knowledge, ask questions, and grow together. Like, comment, and subscribe to fuel the movement!

Don’t forget to share.

Every Second Counts. Help our website grow and reach more people in need. Donate today to make a difference!

Make a one-time donation

Make a monthly donation

Make a yearly donation

Choose an amount

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

$5.00

$15.00

$100.00

Or enter a custom amount

Your contribution is appreciated.

Donate Donate monthly Donate yearly

Cloud Talk, Programming, Security, Tech

How to Win Father of the Year

Quick note: if you’re viewing this via email, come to the site for better viewing. Enjoy!

Children team building exercise on grass — Truly a photo representation of the school system that never hit so hard.
Photo by Lukas, please support by following @pexel.com

I’m just going to assume all the people reading this are grown adults and have experienced that moment in their career (or job) where you’re being tasked with finding someone to lead your team.

You’re provided with a room full of people and still, you manage to find no one who would fit the bill. This shocks you. Why? Because all too often people say they have the “juice” to lead but when placed center stage they fold faster than origami paper.

Embarrassing I know; however, time is ticking, and your client isn’t going to wait for you to find the “right for right now” candidate. But then again, what would be the perfect candidate for this situation?

father with child on shoulders — A good Scrum Daddy will never be an absence father…unless it’s his day off.
Photo by Hannah Nelson, please support by following @pexel.com

The Chosen One

So who is this person that the company is going to have to employ in order to run your band of misfits? Don’t look at me, it’s not me, although Z-daddy makes an excellent leader.

Quickly subscribe to join Zeroclay Nation, so you can join the one and become an army of none. Shameless plug-in aside, back to answering the question. Well like most creative, non-so-creative names in the IT world, they’re called Scrum Masters.

Scrum Masters, while the name sounds like an underground kink club, are accountable for helping their team succeed. They are responsible for managing the exchange of information between team members.

This is done as a team member or collaborator. Most scrum teams (I say most because working in teams with different people creates “experiences may vary situation”) can run themselves so having top-down management isn’t ideal for this band of misfits.

A Scrum Master often helps in groups or on a one-on-one basis (to all of you who thought of Hall and Oats, a big shout out to you, stay classic).

They may facilitate exercises, give guidance, or help people come to conclusions on their own. Scrum Masters are like having a coach that everyone on the team likes and can get along with and who doesn’t stare at you from around the corner while you’re taking a shower.

father and girl on bench on lake shore — A good Scrum Daddy will protect his team, but Z-daddy will always protect his nation.
Photo by Tatiana Syrikova, please support by following @pexel.com

The Perfect Supervisor

Have you ever played the video game Bioshock? Your answer was no? I’m shocked. For those of you who have played you’ll know what I’m laying down and for those of you who don’t, let me explain.

Bioshock, in a nutshell, had an underwater city and within that city were these little girls with syringes who went around drawing what looked to be blood but wasn’t.

I’m not going to get into the whole details, just know every time you sighted a little girl, she wasn’t alone. There would be a giant known as “Big Daddy” walking and for the most part, protecting her. So long story short, don’t mess with the little girl or you would have more than a double barrel to worry about.

Anyway, back to the point, Scrum Masters in a way act as the Big Daddy to a scrum team. Scrum Daddies help their teams by coaching in self-management and cross-functionality, creating focus in providing high-value increments that meet what the client defines as done or better known as “the definition of done”.

Scrum Daddies in times of need will, motivate and remove any impediments to the team’s progress, and ensure all Scrum events taking place are positive, productive, and kept within the timeframe also called timebox.

Scrum Daddies also help product owners by facilitating stakeholder collaboration as requested or needed, leading, training, and coaching them in their adoption, and by finding out what exactly is expected and conveying that to the scrum team.

So you can think of Scrum Daddies are like having that cool boss you can “ascend to a certain level of awesome” with and can be a google translator between the team and product owner.

Father spending time with his children. — I’m sure all you kids are mine…I think.
Photo by Denis Gvozdov, please support by following @pexel.com

Scrum Daddies are important…right?

You may be thinking to yourself, “these guys sound nice but what makes them so important?” If you have ever worked or even played on a team, you’ll know that not everyone thinks the same.

Do you remember the days when you were in school, and the teacher instructed you to get up and go find a partner and it took the class forever for people to settle into their groups? Like you would have a group that already knew they were going to link up but to the other groups developing, the awkwardness and the petty (if your ex and her friends that made up most of the class) was real.

Then you would be instructed to figure out who was going to be the team leader or in my case “you seem smart enough and I have no clue as to what I’m doing, and I assume that you do”. This is a retrospective apology, to my old classmates, sorry, you let the eyeglasses and calm demeanor fool you.

After figuring out the leader you would quickly find that most if not all people couldn’t lead well. There are many elements that go into making a good leader. This is why Scrum Daddies are so important, a good Scrum Daddy (and I say good because I know there are bad ones out there) will do everything in their power to keep the team focused, motivated, and moving along.

You know it’s like having a father instead of seeing them only on the weekends, they live with you and you guys play catch in the yard. Trust me, I’m not emotionally broken.

Team brainstorming at a meeting. — If we put Taco Tuesday on a Wednesday, we could boost productivity.
Photo by Yan Krukau, please support by following @pexel.com

More of a Father Figure

So do you want to become somebody’s Scrum Daddy? Do you think you have what it takes to protect your team of little ones? Good, in this field, having a degree would be nice but at last, you don’t need one.

Not to become a Scrum Master, instead, you’ll need to start building skills that will empower you to lead your team to the best of your ability. Developing problem-solving skills, adaptability, motivation, effective communication, and organization are going to be skills needed in this role.

Always a key thing to note is to never take sides or have any predisposition for someone’s opinion. Instead, Scrum Masters should serve as a mediator helping the parties reach a solution.

You could pick up some online courses which would help you gain a deeper understanding of what is expected in this role. Just remember when you are a leader, depending on who’s on your team, they’re all your children…you just don’t have to pay child support this go around.

man in black suit smiling — I finally get to keep my paycheck this go around! Thanks Z-Daddy!
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio, please support by following @pexel.com

Made it this far and found this to be entertaining? Then a big thanks to you and please show your support by cracking a like, scripting a comment, or plug-in to follow.

Would like to give sincere thanks to current followers and subscribers, your support and actions mean a lot and has a play in the creation of each script.

Do you think you have what it takes to be a Scrum Daddy or Momma?

Script a comment below about what you think your experience would be like.

AI, Cloud Talk, Programming, Security, Tech

Degreeless Teams and Loose Commitments

Consider following on social media!

Quick note: if you’re viewing this via email, come to the site for better viewing. Enjoy!

people looking into a laptop — Lee: Guys, I don’t like going to scriptingthewhy. Let’s just go back to work.
Jenn: Lee, you’re the intern, your opinion doesn’t matter. Now go get us coffee.
Photo by cottonbro studio, please support by following @pexel.com

Have you ever been on a team and no matter what or how hard any of you try, nothing seems to mesh well? You all get along and work well together but none of the ideas any of you provide for a project you’re working on yields any positive results.

Suffering the same circumstances of just being another failed new year’s resolution where either you or someone on the team falls off track by getting distracted causing scope creep.

Or no matter the pace that’s set it seems not to be fast enough and you’ll never see the project done. How would you feel if I told you that adopting a different framework from what you’re familiar with might be the remedy to your and your teams’ problems?

As I have mentioned in a script before, this might be another process you will come to trust.

young running down the road — Tim: I have to be more agile; I can do that with sprints.
Z-Daddy: That’s the wrong agile, you don’t have to do CrossFit.
Photo by Our Anti Rafsanjani Gums, please support by following @pexel.com

Full Team Full Sprint

What’s this crazy new process, this insane new wave of thinking that’s going to see your party moving along so you can get done sooner rather than later?

You might want to switch to Agile. No, not being more agile although I see what they did there, and you will too. Agile methodology is a way to manage a project by breaking it up into several phases.

In software development, Agile practices include requirements discovery and solution improvement through a collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customers or end users.

Instead of betting everything on a “big bang” launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments. I know what you’re thinking, no this would not work at a casino if you tried this approach. In fact, this would see you being asked to leave the table with two well-dressed gentle-for-right-now-men wanting to “question” you and you’d be lucky to leave with a broken hand.

The Agile Manifesto for software development was a declaration of unifying philosophy from frameworks like Scrum, Extreme programming, and Feature-Driven Development (FDD). The Agile Manifesto greatly departed from the waterfall-style project management approaches that were widely in use prior to that time.

The Waterfall methodology is a project management approach that emphasizes a linear progression from the beginning to the end of a project. This methodology, often used by engineers, is front-loaded to rely on careful planning, detailed documentation, and consecutive execution.

Translation, there’s an Everest amount of paperwork to do. So, if you look at it in a corporate way, Smokey the bear was right. You can prevent forest fires…by simply cutting down the forest.

Now, the following is in their words, and their wording is well… going to sound a bit interesting; “We are uncovering better ways to developing software by doing it and helping others do it.” Yes, this does sound like a spank me daddy moment. Come get yourself a Scrum Daddy. Okay, that was cringe, I’m sorry. Back to the manifesto,

Through this work, we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

I think everyone would agree to add one more line saying, “pay to merit over able to punch the clock.”

a young man delivering items — Look at this and try not to have a Karen moment.
Karen: Sir, you don’t live here.
Photo by Kindel Media, please support by following @pexel.com

Taste of Agile

You may be wondering, who in their left-wing corporate America mind follows this way of thinking to get a project done? Well, you’ll be glad to know that there are a decent number of companies that use teams who operate in this fashion.

Agile is the best methodology to follow in cases of complex projects. A complex project may have various interconnected phases and each stage may be dependent on many others rather than one as in simple projects.

The most well-known companies that use Agile methodology are Apple and IBM (yes, we’re still not on speaking terms), Microsoft, and Procter & Gamble. However, there are many other companies that use agile as well, to great effect.

Yes, I know it might not taste like it, but you will be surprised to know McDonald’s uses Agile. As you can figure Agile methods are preferred for large and complex projects.

So the next time you decide to go get yourself some McDonald’s, take a big bite and don’t chew, I want to watch you from the corner of the room swallow and take comfort in knowing a team of people puts that juicy maybe-it’s-real-meaty big bun action together for you to enjoy.

Enjoy the read so far? Why don’t you consider subscribing so you can keep up to date?

two men sitting at a computer — Mark: Eric… I know it looks like you’re working on the project, but looking at your tabs I also see you’re…
Eric: It’s Stack Overflow, they just turned their colors to black and orange.
Photo by cottonbro studio, please support by following @pexel.com

Fixing Loose Ends

Ever thought about who and how this framework helps? Me neither until now. The Agile framework is a powerful tool that helps managers, team members, and clients work more efficiently and more effectively while delivering the highest quality product within the constraints of the budget.

You can think of this as an assembly line in a factory where the belt can go back and forth instead of just one direction. Agile produces important metrics like lead time, cycle time, and throughput that measure the team’s performance, identify bottlenecks and make data-driven decisions to correct them.

It seems like a lot of back and forth, but this is better than pushing a product out only for it to come back with a monolith list of items to fix. If you worked in the market of flipping houses, you will know that it’s the worst when you’re about to put the house on the market only to find more things that need fixing.

young lady in graduation outfit. — Sarah: You mean I didn’t have to get a degree to join an agile team?
Z-Daddy: No, nor do you have to join CrossFit.
Photo by Leeloo Thefirst, please show support by following @pexels.com

Framing Degreeless

Do you need a degree to be Agile? Well with this being a framework and not job placement, you don’t need a degree however, many employers prefer candidates with a bachelor’s degree in a relevant field, such as Information Technology.

The need to have a degree in the IT field or any other fields where people have displayed, they can land a job or start their careers without one, has always been one of those weird barriers put in place.

It’s like having a bouncer at a nightclub and to get passed him, you simply dress as a ladyboy. Companies, it’s okay, you don’t have to be in the closet anymore, stop keeping the degreeless jobless.

My ranting aside, you don’t have to be a person or team in IT to be introduced to Agile. Each team will benefit from collaboration, recurring interactions, recognizing failure early, incrementing fast results, and finally continuous learning. If you wanted a position, you could become a Scrum Daddy.

Scrum Daddies should have significant work experience working with Agile as well as excellent teamwork and communication skills. Always remember to be a good daddy and bond with your children.

older gentleman seat at laptop and on phone — Honey, we don’t have to worry about my hip, some guy named Z-Daddy said we were thinking of the wrong agile. So, cancel the CrossFit subscription.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio, please support by following @pexel.com

Made it this far and found this to be entertaining? Then a big thanks to you and please show your support by cracking a like, sharing this with whomever, scripting a comment, or plug-in to follow.

Would like to give sincere thanks to current followers and subscribers, your support and actions mean a lot and has a play in the creation of each script.

Do you find the Agile framework interesting?

Script a comment below about how you think it could help you.