Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

The R & D teams of many software companies like to use Scrum to manage the R & D process. Scrum is an agile methodology born in the 1990s and has been used within CORNERSTONE.

Compared to other traditional approaches to waterfall development, the biggest advantage of Scrum is that it focuses on continuous, rapid iteration and adaptability to change. If waterfall development is used, project results are determined and agreed upon at the beginning of the project, usually with detailed plans and project specifications. The project plan is generated from these specifications, by taking the completion of the project in the future as the starting point, moving backward, planning the time, budget and phase connectivity in a linear way.

The finished product of waterfall development is a roadmap that calculates all the development work that needs to be done by the time a software is released, but the downside is that if there are changes in the software development process, including problems with the timeline or phase connections, and even in many cases the budget needs to be completely redone, it actually undermines the plan.

Scrum focuses on continuous and fast iterations to achieve an ideal end point. Instead of detailed planning are lean management or requirements and review meetings, which measure the results of each iteration. The purpose of the review meeting should revolve around a question: "has the work we done brought us closer to our target needs?"

The power of Scrum comes from its ability to manage work and achieve an unknown, unique, or unprecedented result. This method can systematically and gradually solve the problems arising in the process of research and development. Waterfall development works best if the processes and work involved are predictable and have been tried before.

The difference is like the difference between building a bridge and building a rocket ship. Rocket technology is relatively new, and it takes many incremental steps to build a rocket-carrying ship, which can be repeated many times to be successful. The work done by Space Exploration Technology Corporation (SpaceX) to land the rocket on board is a case in point.

On the contrary, people have been familiar with the process of building a bridge and have successfully practiced it countless times. Bridge construction does not need to be repeated many times and requires high time and cost planning. this is the area where waterfall development is often used.

The similarity between OKR and Scrum is that both methods require someone to specifically manage the implementation, which we call "Scrum Master" or "OKR leader", whose responsibility is to ensure that the team follows the rules.

Scrum is a highly standardized methodology with clear responsibilities and processes. The benefits of Scrum include transparency, project visibility and frequent communication. The team collectively decides what kind of work they can accomplish in a two-week sprint, which makes Scrum very democratic.

In fact, OKR also has a set of rules that determine what is goal O, what is the key result KR, and how to combine the two to measure the achievement of goals.

Like Scrum, OKR has a schedule-quarterly and annual-which is much longer than the two-week sprint. The first thing to do in setting up an OKR is for the company leader to decide what goals to achieve, and then the team sets its own OKR and ensures that the team's OKR is consistent with the company's goals.

As long as everyone knows the scope and parameters of the two methods, OKR and Scrum can be successfully combined, and the results are really good. After the establishment of the company's OKR, we will further implement the action plan to achieve OKR. Sprint and action plan can be combined organically in the action cycle to promote the achievement of team OKR.

In order for the two approaches to be in tune, it is important that at the beginning of each quarter, a head of OKR and a head of Scrum sit with their R & D team to decide on the most important things (usually three) that need to be done in the quarter.

Because the OKR cycle is longer, the goal is more macro, and Sprint involves more specific implementation-level work, so we need to consider OKR first. In order for OKR to be carried out effectively at this stage, we should pay more attention to the measurement of results than to emphasize the pursuit of the realization of results.

For example, if your goal is to solve the bug of software and improve the product, then counting how many software bug has been eliminated is not an effective key result. There is one less bug,bug per fix, but if more software bug is reported, you are not making the software better, you are just counting how many bug you have fixed.

Once you have set the goals and key results of the OKR, you can start planning the Sprint. At this stage, the most important thing is to determine the cycle of the Sprint. If a Sprint lasts for one month, a single Sprint goal is likely to directly correspond to one of the three OKR goals of the development team. As for the more common two-week Sprint, its Sprint goal may become a course of action for the OKR target.

After the key results are project-oriented, we need to further refine the work, refine the project into specific tasks, and ensure that each task has a responsible person and a deadline. only in this way can we ensure that each work is implemented and avoid work delays as much as possible.

(picture shows CORNERSTONE Visualization Task Kanban)

We prefer the second approach because it connects the two frameworks while maintaining their original goals, namely, Sprint to manage production and code transfer, while OKR sets goals to measure the results of the evaluation.

However, this also means that each OKR needs its own Sprint timeline. This approach works well if you have a large development team working in different areas of a product, such as pre-work, post-work, and system management. Using this approach, each domain leads to one OKR and one Sprint timeline, while there are three OKRs within the team.

We also recommend this approach for small development teams that do not have the ability to run three Sprint timelines, but only need to focus on a single OKR. CORNERSTONE provides functional modules including task / requirements / test management, iterative planning, defect tracking, report statistics, teamwork, WIKI, shared files and calendars, etc. Teams with less than 20 people can use it for free and click to register CORNERSTONE for free.

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