Project Management

Manage Software Engineering project to ensure software delivery happens on time & on budget.

Scrum

Project Management method for Iterative Software Processes (eg. Agile, XP) with phases:

1. Initial Phase Requirements, Design System Architecture.
2. Sprint Cycle Develop & release a incremental software version in 2-4 weeks.
3. Project Closure Complete documentation, Retrospective.

Scrum Terminology

Term	Definition
Development team	A self-organizing group of up to 7 developers responsible for building software and essential project documents.
Potentially shippable product increment	A software increment delivered from a sprint, ideally in a finished tested state requiring no further work for final integration.
Product backlog	A prioritized single source of tasks, features, requirements, or supplementary items for the Scrum team to address, expressed as User Stories.
Sprint backlog (Sprint Goal)	A fixed (unchanged for entire sprint) set of Product Backlog Items (PBIs) selected to worked on the sprint cycle. Unfinished items are returned to the product backlog.
Product owner	A stakeholder responsible for defining and prioritizing features, owns / manages the Product Backlog, maximising value of product delivered.
Scrum	A daily short 15 minute team meeting to review progress and plan work for the day. In depth discussion should be done outside of Scrum.
Scrum Master	Ensures the Scrum process is followed, shields the team from distractions by point of contact for rest of organisation, removes blockers from progress.
Sprint	A 2-4 week development iteration focused on delivering specific goals.
Sprint Review	A 1 hr × no. Sprint weeks meeting at the end of a sprint between Product Owner & External Stakeholders on the state of the project to generate potential changes to product backlog.
Sprint Retrospective	A 45 min × no. Sprint weeks meeting at the end of a sprint where the Internal Stakeholders reflect on what went well, what didn’t, and how to improve next time.

Velocity

Velocity $V$ is the average workload as User Story Points $p_i$ a development over $n$ no. of Sprints:

$$V = \frac{\sum^{n}_{i} p_i}{n}$$

Sprint Estimate Velocity gives an estimate of workload that may be completed per sprint:

• Sprint Planning useful for planning workload allocation of each sprint.
• Performance Metric benchmark for Scrum team performance.

Product Backlog

Good Product Backlogs should be:

• Detailed not ambiguous.
• Emergent up to date with latest requirements.
• Estimated product backlog items have workload estimates as story points.
• Prioritised items ranked by priority.