Zoho Sprint – Agile, Scrum and Sprint

Plan the Sprint

Based on the prioritized list of work items, the product owner, sprint owner, and the team meet up for the ‘Sprint Planning Meeting‘. They discuss the work items and decide the scope of work for that sprint. The product owner prioritizes work items from the backlog. A team usually choose 6-10 work items in a sprint and each member of the team is assigned a task. The sprint owner picks the workable items from the prioritized list and assigns them to the team members. Other work items are maintained in the backlog and moved to the upcoming sprints.

Sprint

If Backlog is the brain of your Scrum project, Sprint is the heart that keeps your project active. It is the time-boxed duration (of up to four weeks), where the team delivers a product increment to the customer. Based on the feedback, the team builds the requirements and develops a quality product at the end of the project. The next sprint begins immediately after the previous sprint ends.

What is Agile?

Agile is an iterative project management technique, which is most commonly used in software. The primary goal of this approach is to build an iterative process where teams can quickly respond to change. This approach is completely different from the traditional waterfall model, which focuses on testing only after the product is fully built. In contrast, an Agile team will deliver the product in iterative cycles called ‘Sprints’, which means the product is tested and delivered to the customers for feedback at regular intervals. Agile primarily focuses on the team’s capacity (which is defined as the ‘Velocity of the team’) to meet deadlines. We’ve created the Agile guide to help get you get started in understanding this process. Read through this guide and create your first project using the Agile framework.

What is Scrum?

Scrum is an Agile project management methodology for building projects in periodic cycles called Sprints. It’s involves more communication and collaboration, as every phase of the project is designed, developed, tested, and delivered to the end users for feedback. Scrum is an “inspect and adapt” process, by which a team can deliver a workable phase and receive feedback to improve the development process. This process is both simple to understand and complex to master, because you need to keep up with the sprint cycle.

Benefits of Implementing Scrum

Scrum is the best alternative to the traditional waterfall model. Here are a few perks:

• Break down the projects to workable phases
• Work your project phases in periodic cycles called Sprints
• Get real-time feedback from customers
• Make required changes over time
• Commonly used in the software sector, but can be implemented in other industries
• Identify pitfalls at the early stages of development
• Deliver quality products to the customers

Create Your Team

A team is a group of individuals who work towards a defined target over a designated period of time. So, the organization that you work for is considered a team. In simple terms, a team is nothing but a portal; every team works across different projects.

Custom Layouts for Projects

You can customize the layouts for your projects and associate additional fields with them. We have added a new default field called ‘Project Stages ‘ that lets you include the status of the project.  Project Stage is a pickup custom field that has the following stages,

1. Planning
2. In-Progress
3. Quote
4. Negotiation
5. Implementation
6. Completed
7. Closed
8. Abandoned