Scrum: Extended Artefacts

 

Let’s discuss the scrum artifacts; we discussed last time that the official artifacts of scrum include – Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and increments.

Today giving you more insights on the additional artifacts that the scrum team should refer to understand the progress of the sprint and expected deliveries meeting all criteria.

Burndown Chart – Amount of work remains

This artifact or graph shows you the amount of work that remains in the current sprint. For the sake of measurement, we used to estimate the user stories in story points, which is again in relative mode of the measurement of the estimation. So when the sprint starts then this burndown chart started with the total amount of the story points and as soon as the developer keeps doing the development and marking the story done the respective stories' story points get burned and hence again few story points are left out to burn. This way product owner and scrum master understand the progress of the sprint.

 

Burndown Chart Sample

The guideline of the burndown chart shows that the line should be roaming over it, which shows the better health condition of the sprint else of the line going in straight or higher due to the addition of more user stories within the sprint. This way the burndown chart does not look good because the number line goes up whenever new user stories are added. And hence it is better to avoid the addition of new user stories unless or until the sprint goal is getting disturbed.

A famous quote I can recollect - Freezed water is easy to walk and Freezed Sprint is easy to develop.

 

Burnup Chart – Amount of work done

 

This is the reverse of the burndown chart where the graph shows that the amount of work done or completed.

Definition of Done

Official definition is "The Definition of Done is a formal description of the state of the Increment when it meets the quality measures required for the product."

This is the checklist that is developed or created by the developer in consultation with the product owner within the sprint. Once the user story is marked as done and unit testing is performed then the developer needs to refer to this DoD to ensure that the requirement is met and fulfilled all criteria. This is the state where after sprint completion and post-sprint review with stakeholders this story becomes increments and ready for deployment.

 This way scrum artifacts are an important reference for the product owner and scrum master and complete developer team to check the sprint progress and measure the sprint goal.

The scrum master and product owner should ensure that all the best practices should be practiced daily and all relevant artifacts getting reviewed daily to ensure sprint success.

Hence to conclude it ,the Definition of Done in Scrum ensures a shared understanding of when work is considered complete, meeting all quality standards. It guarantees that each increment is potentially releasable and maintains consistency across the Scrum Team.