Scrum Values:  Visibility

Manage risks and drive stakeholder alignment through transparency.

Posted on September 18, 2015
by Doug Klugh

One value of Scrum that is often overlooked is visibility, which actually enables critical Scrum practices.  Visibility is realized by communicating status to all stakeholders, which includes the status of individual and team commitments, impediments, progress, along with other metrics and indicators.  Scrum is based on empirical process methods, which demands process transparency to enable inspection and adaption at all stages of development.  Compared to the defined process model (on which waterfall methodologies are based), these methods operate under the premise that software development always generates the same output for each given input.  While software may operate in this manner, software development rarely does.

In adherence to empirical methods, Scrum facilitates numerous opportunities to inspect the process and make adaptations to improve efficiency and productivity.  Process inspection begins each day at the daily scrum and continues with the retrospective at the end of each sprint.  Each day, team members, along with all other stakeholders, should have easy access to project indicators, such as burndown charts to show progress against the planned commitment, cumulative flow diagrams to show the relationship between lead time and work in progress (WIP), along with other metrics.
Tags:
commitment metrics process Scrum

Doug Klugh

Doug is an experienced software development leader, engineer, and craftsman having delivered consumer and enterprise firmware/software solutions servicing more than one billion users through 20+ years of leadership.

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