The daily scrum meeting lightweight thread

80 ■ Scrum Project Management

the product scope is documented. When the backlog information is not clear or is insufficient, the team must constantly stop to generate at least enough of a backlog for the next sprint. The failure to develop a solid product backlog and maintain it delays project activities, but may not in itself be catastrophic to the development team’s objectives.

Of the listed items, the last one can be deadly. While it is possible to execute the scrum approach covertly, the initiative is more likely to succeed with management support.

In a nutshell, the product backlog process should follow these simple steps:

In essence, when we are using scrum, we have two classes of reviews: the daily scrum meeting and the sprint retrospective/planning review at the end/beginning of each sprint duration. The daily scrum meeting is a lightweight thread, whereas the sprint meeting is a heavyweight process. If we apply the scrum approach with the required tools (daily meeting, sprint meeting), lack of reviews should never be a cause for a breakdown in performance. One of the main points of the scrum approach is that we should never get into a situation where lack of knowledge is causing project problems.

We can coordinate the atoms by visualizing the product as a set of concentric rings or as a set of sets. The innermost ring is the core product (hardware or software) in minimum configuration. The core product provides the first release of sellable hardware or software. As we add a new ring or a superset, we produce another version of a sellable product. This approach requires substantial planning and a complete understanding of what constitutes a minimum configuration. The payoff literally occurs as we release sellable products to customer purchase orders and deliver revenue during the development process. Furthermore, the goal of producing sellable products at each sprint reduces our risk because we are never in the middle of a multi-month prototype development that may or may not be rejected by the customer.

3.12.6.6 Incomplete Understanding of Dependencies