Responsibilities of the ScrumMasters:

The responsibilities of the ScrumMasters can be summarized as follows:

• Remove the barriers between development and the Product Owner so that the Product Owner directly drives development.

• Teach the Product Owner how to maximize ROI and meet his or her objectives through Scrum.

• Improve the lives of the development team by facilitating creativity and empowerment.

• Improve the productivity of the development team in any way possible.

• Improve the engineering practices and tools so that each increment of functionality is potentially shippable.

• Keep information about the team’s progress up-to-date and visible to all parties.

XP @ Scrum

XP @ Scrum:

Scrum has been employed successfully as a management wrapper for Extreme Programming engineering practices. Scrum provides the agile management mechanisms; Extreme Programming provides the integrated engineering practices.

Benefits of XP @ Scrum include:

1. The agile management and control mechanisms of Scrum are applicable for any type of project, including business initiatives that consist of multiple, simultaneous software development, business development, re-engineering, marketing, support, and implementation projects. xp@Scrum projects fit within the overall management framework of these initiatives.
2. xP@Scrum projects realize the full benefits of self-organization; teams are iteration (or Sprint) goal directed, rather than story directed.
3. When Extreme Programming projects are wrapped by Scrum, they becomes scalable and can be run simultaneously by non-colocated teams.
4. Scrum implements in a day; Extreme Programming can be gradually implemented within the Scrum framework.
5. xp@Scrum projects benefit from ADM's business value metrics process for measuring and managing initiative ROI.

Sine of death by UI Test Automation

Software Waterfall Cycle.

Basic Waterfall Cycle. 

Agile Testing Quadrants.

Agile Testing Quadrants.

Overview ScrumMaster Role.............

Overview ScrumMaster Role:

The ScrumMaster is responsible for making sure that all the pieces of the Scrum process come together and work as a whole. The Product Owner must do his or her job. The Team must do its job. The chickens must be kept in line. The Product Owner and the Team must collaborate appropriately and use the Scrum meetings for inspection and adaptation.

The responsibilities of the ScrumMasters can be summarized as follows:

• Remove the barriers between development and the Product Owner so that the Product Owner directly drives development.

• Teach the Product Owner how to maximize ROI and meet his or her objectives through Scrum.

• Improve the lives of the development team by facilitating creativity and empowerment.

• Improve the productivity of the development team in any way possible.

• Improve the engineering practices and tools so that each increment of functionality is potentially shippable.

• Keep information about the team’s progress up-to-date and visible to all parties.

When the ScrumMaster fulfills these responsibilities, the project usually stays on track. These responsibilities should be enough to keep the ScrumMaster busy; no ScrumMaster should have any time left over to act like a typical boss.

Indeed, a ScrumMaster who acts like a program manager probably isn’t fulfilling all of his or her duties as a ScrumMaster.

ScrumMaster.......

ScrumMaster:

A strange name like “ScrumMaster” for the person who facilitates Scrum projects?

Why didn’t I continue to use the standard title “project manager”? 

The ScrumMaster are different from those of a traditional project manager. 

This difference in terminology is symbolic of a drastic change managers must make to their approach if they are to effectively manage Scrum projects.

The authority of the ScrumMaster is largely indirect; it springs mainly from the ScrumMaster’s knowledge of Scrum rules and practices and his or her work to ensure that they are followed.

The ScrumMaster is responsible for the success of the project, and he or she helps increase the probability of success by helping the Product Owner select the most valuable Product Backlog and by helping the Team turn that backlog into functionality. 

The ScrumMaster earns no awards or medals because the ScrumMaster is only a facilitator.

Roles in Scrum........

Roles in Scrum:

There are only three roles in Scrum:

1.) The Product Owner.

2.) The Team.

3.) The ScrumMaster.

All management responsibilities in a project are divided among these three roles.

The Product Owner is responsible for representing the interests of everyone with a stake in the project and its resulting system. The Product Owner achieves initial and ongoing funding for the project by creating the project’s initial overall requirements, return on investment (ROI) objectives, and release plans. The list of requirements is called the Product Backlog. The Product Owner is responsible for using the Product Backlog to ensure that the most valuable functionality is produced first and built upon; this is achieved by frequently prioritizing the Product Backlog to queue up the most valuable requirements for the next iteration.

The Team is responsible for developing functionality. Teams are self-managing, self-organizing, and cross-functional, and they are responsible for figuring out how to turn Product Backlog into an increment of functionality within an iteration and managing their own work to do so. Team members are collectively responsible for the success of each iteration and of the project as a whole.

The ScrumMaster is responsible for the Scrum process, for teaching Scrum to everyone involved in the project, for implementing Scrum so that it fits within an organization’s culture and still delivers the expected benefits, and for ensuring that everyone follows Scrum rules and practices.

Scrum Basics...........

Scrum Basics :

Scrum hangs all of its practices on an iterative, incremental process. The lower circle represents an iteration of development activities that occur one after another. The output of each iteration is an increment of product.

The upper circle represents the daily inspection that occurs during the iteration, in which the individual team members meet to inspect each others’ activities and make appropriate adaptations. Driving the iteration is a list of requirements. This cycle repeats until the project is no longer funded. 

The above figure operates this way: At the start of an iteration, the team reviews what it must do. It then selects what it believes it can turn into an increment of potentially shippable functionality by the end of the iteration. The team is then left alone to make its best effort for the rest of the iteration. At the end of the iteration, the team presents the increment of functionality it built so that the stakeholders can inspect the functionality and timely adaptations to the project can be made.

The core of Scrum lies in the iteration. The team takes a look at the requirements, considers the available technology, and evaluates its own skills and capabilities. It then collectively determines how to build the functionality, modifying its approach daily as it encounters new complexities, difficulties, and surprises. The team figures out what needs to be done and selects the best way to do it. This creative process is the core of the Scrum’s productivity. 

Extreme Programming Practices in brief

Extreme Programming Practices in brief :

XP is an adaptive method, so although all XP teams need to consistently embrace the values and
principles, the details of the actual day-to-day operation of an XP project vary from team to team.

A reasonable question then is “where do I start?”.

XP provides a set of daily practices that, used together, have been demonstrated to efficiently produce high quality software.

These practices are:

· Whole Team
· Planning Game
· Customer Tests
· Small Releases
· Simple Designs
· Pair Programming
· Test-Driven Development
· Design Improvement
· Continuous Integration
· Collective Ownership
· Coding Standard
· Sustainable Pace
· Metaphor

Extreme Programming

Extreme Programming Values and Principles :

The XP values are:
· Communication
· Simplicity
· Feedback
· Courage

An XP project relies on these four values. If your organisation or team doesn' t truly share these
values, then an XP project will fail.

Of course, most of those values are motherhood-and-apple pie – it would be hard to find an organisation that said that it didn' t believe in them.

XP tries to remove some of the vagueness from these values by describing principles that embody the values.

· Open, honest communication
· Quality work
· Rapid feedback at all levels
· Assume Simplicity

Microsoft's Calculator Failed in following calculation..........

Microsoft's Calculator Failed : 

Go to Start-->Run-->type Calc. and Check the following....

2704/52 = try yourself….Doesn't Work.......

And these also..........

2809/53 ; 2916/54 ; 3025/55

 

Career Options for Software Test Engineers :

Career Options for Software Test Engineers : 

They can go for SCM / Security domain or towards the management roles. 

Extreme Programming Values and Principles.

Extreme Programming Values and Principles :

The XP values are:

· Communication

· Simplicity

· Feedback

· Courage

An XP project relies on these four values. If your organisation or team doesn' t truly share these values, then an XP project will fail. Of course, most of those values are motherhood-and-apple pie – it would be hard to find an organisation that said that it didn' t believe in them.

XP tries to remove some of the vagueness from these values by describing principles that embody the values.

· Open, honest communication

· Quality work

· Rapid feedback at all levels

· Assume Simplicity

More About Extreme Programming.

More About Extreme Programming :

Extreme Programming is an agile, adaptive software develop methodology with a well-defined set of values and core practices.

· Agile : XP is consistent with the values and principles of the Agile Alliance

· Adaptive : XP' s documented practices are only a starting point – XP teams adapt the process to improve their results.

· Values: Since XP is adaptive, the details vary from one XP project to another. But the underlying values stay the same. If the values change, then the process is no longer XP.

· Core Practices : XP specifies a set of mutually-supporting practices that encourage collaboration and reduce the cost of change.

XP does not have complex rules, and it does not try to specify exactly how to respond to everypossible situation the team will encounter, instead, XP tries to be “barely sufficient”.

Dee W. Hock, founder of the Visa organisation, made these points :

· Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex, intelligent behaviour.

· Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple, stupid behaviour.

XP specifies the rules – the values and the practices – and lets the team figure out the detailed
behaviour.

Extreme Programming (XP)

Extreme Programming (XP) :

Extreme Programming, or XP to most aficionados, was developed by Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, and Ron Jeffries. XP preaches the values of community, simplicity, feedback and courage.

Important aspects of XP are its contribution to altering the view of the cost of change and its emphasis on technical excellence through refactoring and test-first development. XP provides a system of dynamic practices, whose integrity as a holistic unit has been proven. XP has clearly garnered the most interest of any of the Agile approaches.