A Guide to Optimizing Agile Scrum Teams

Why Agile?

In today’s market, companies depend on gaining any competitive edge they can to be successful. Delivering more features faster is key to this success. Companies must optimize their time-to-market if they want to increase their bottom line.

Technologies are changing rapidly. Development teams must keep up with the changes while delivering reliable software. For more than two decades, developers have recognized that smaller, self-directing teams working in time-boxed development cycles provide the structure needed for teams to work effectively and adapt to change.

The Agile methodologies emerged in 2001 as the optimal way to succeed in the software industry when a group of developers came together to define a set of values and principles that were common among a variety of frameworks that emphasized rapid development and close collaboration with stakeholders. Scrum is the most widely used framework that adheres to the Agile methodologies.

Regardless of its popularity, companies have taken elements but not necessarily implemented it fully.

What Makes an Efficient Scrum Team?

To some extent, your willingness to make changes to your process determines your level of success in optimizing your scrum team. Agile development requires a change in mindset from traditional waterfall methods.

Agile is an incremental approach that focuses on constant evaluation of project priorities and requirements. The goal is develop quality products quickly that meet customer demands. Rather than spending months planning a large release with dozens or more features that won’t be available to customers for 6 months to a year, Agile teams look at ways to deliver smaller chunks of functionality on a more frequent basis. As customer demands change, your team’s priorities must change to focus on the most valuable improvements to your product. Agile teams need to be able to reprioritize their workload quickly to meet the changing needs.

To deliver quickly, teams must focus on the minimum amount of functionality that they must provide to satisfy customers. Focusing on a “minimally viable product” helps teams to limit the potential for scope creep that causes delays in product distribution. In addition, by getting products in the hands of their customers quickly, teams can get feedback that informs future product development.

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