An Introduction to Scrum Sessions

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the amount of work you or your team need to accomplish in order to complete your next project? Developing teams need to make the best of their time to meet deadlines to keep their clients or team manager happy.

Scrum sessions allow developers to fulfill bigger goals by focusing on little ones to make the best of their time during project development. Show off your level of seniority by learning how scrum meetings work and how they can help you optimize your developer skills to meet deadlines, one task at a time.

In this Blog:

Why Scrum Sessions are Useful for Developers

How do Scrum Sessions Work? 

Reaching your Sprint Goal, One day at a time

Handling Feedback Efficiently with Scrum Sessions

Scrum Sessions as a tool for Remote Developers

Impressive Projects need Impressive Planning.

Want to know what a scrum session is like?

Why Scrum Sessions are Useful for Developers

Developing teams work hard to make their software effective and appealing when users get their hands on the final product. When developers build their code, it takes them time to get it right.

There’s a lot of trial and error going on during the development of any project, and when things go south, it can cause the team to lose focus and take more time than agreed upon to achieve completion.

Scrum sessions are designed to help teams organize project goals by handling the level of effort for each task. And, if you didn't know, organization is one of the most important soft skills for computer programmers doing remote work.

So instead of handing developers a task that would take them a month to complete (because of its size), they split it into different little tasks that make up for the big one.

The idea? Give each team member a task that will take them two days to complete and review their progress. This way, a team’s developer skills are put to good use and give the team manager a chance to receive timely feedback by having users review the work in progress.

Giving a team a task that will take them a month puts them at risk of a user not being pleased with the final product, in which case you and your team just lost a month’s work. Scrum sessions allow developers to organize their workflow efficiently by focusing on what they can accomplish in the short run.

How do Scrum Sessions Work? 

Here’s an excellent chart recommended by one of our mentors showcasing each step of the scrum cycle to apply on your remote software developer jobs. We call it a cycle because it is supposed to repeat itself during the project development to reach bigger goals.

Take a look, and then we will break down each step for you to grasp better what makes them so efficient.

Image Source 

Vision

The gateway to your new project, getting to know each requirement and what the end goal is to achieve completion.

User Stories

Basic engineering; you know what you have to build, but what will make it a success among its users? It goes back to doing your research and interviewing users to understand the product and how it is expected to work. Data is important.

Product Backlog

Once you know what you need to do based on what the users expect, you list the things you need to work on to make them happen. You do this by having sprint planning meetings.

Selected Product Backlog

This is where it gets interesting; now, you divide tasks based on their level of effort (remember, each task should be achievable in under two days). You should be able to see the big picture divided into smaller tasks.

Sprint Backlog

You discuss with each team member the task they will be assigned and make sure they can complete it within the scrum timeline. You will give directions to your team during another spring planning meeting.

Once the Sprint Backlog is set up, the daily scrum cycle begins in which every day, each team member will give an update on their progress (Sprint Goal). The whole project may last a month, but each day you will be able to review how the team is proceeding and give them assistance when they need it.

New Functionality

Once you hit your mark with each of your daily scrums, you take a step back to review what you’ve accomplished for the product. 

Sprint Review

It’s essential to look back at how efficient your daily scrum was; if you did or didn’t succeed with your tasks, you take a moment to analyze what went wrong or right during the sessions.

Retrospective

Feedback is always important, so the retrospective will bring your work back to the users whom your product is made for. If your work succeeds, then you can move on to further tasks. However, if it didn’t, it’s back to square one.

Reaching your Sprint Goal, One day at a time

Scrum sessions are supposed to help a team of developers win or fail small tasks to continue working periodically on what encompasses the whole project. It’s not about proving what you can do in short periods; it's about dividing the work so that it doesn’t overwhelm developers.

It helps developer teams focus by making the best of their time while working on bigger projects.  

Handling Feedback Efficiently with Scrum Sessions

Scrum Sessions allow team managers to give instant feedback and correct any deviation from the course their team of developers is on. Daily scrum meetings usually take up one to two minutes per member when reviewing the team’s progress. 

If a team member needs further help and is taking longer than they should during their daily scrums, you need to set aside their issues and give them extra attention to give them the aid they need to continue.

However, this must be done in a separate meeting so that it doesn’t affect the flow of other team members and their daily sprint goals.

Scrum Sessions as a tool for Remote Developers

Working remotely is all about how you time and show your developer skills.
Being unorganized will only waste your time and that of the company's.

It also gives your team a chance to constantly communicate their progress with their managers and receive real-time feedback. Another plus is that it allows teams to address issues as they arise without affecting the work other members may be completing. 

Impressive Projects need Impressive Planning. (Career Growth and Experience)

Scrum sessions help teams solve problems; it’s a way to divide the tasks they need to accomplish. It ensures the workflow is not at any risk of getting stuck. Using scrum sessions to organize the project’s tasks for the team will ensure they won’t get overwhelmed and make the best of their time.

So if you have something big coming your way, we advise you to consider scrum sessions to go through with the project at hand. Use what you’ve learned in this blog to show an efficient workflow and impress your manager.

Want to know what a scrum session is like?

We uploaded to Awana's youtube channel a mock-up scrum session with some of our camp mentors. Check it out!