A BPM view on Scrum

My second post describing Scrum's Sprint phase is online now.

Hi, I was recommended to view this and I believe that it's a good thing that the scrum process is documented for teams combining ARIS with Scrum

I think you have caught the process well but I do miss out on two important aspects. First we have the difference between delivery and release. The principle for the sprint is that you create deployable software every sprint. This does not mean that you need to deliver this to the final product. For product companies this is an important principle but it is also essential for enterprise organizations. A big mis understanding about scrum is that you need to update the production environment every sprint and many Ops react to this, not thinking that they can do this. By differentiating between delivery and release you can clarify this. Of course, with agile values you would want to release every delivery, but this might not always be the case.

Also, you write that the scrum master is responsible for the communication. This is not necessarily true: the product owner is responsible for the communication with stakeholders. this is a group not identified in the process but can be seen as all not directly involved as team members, scrum master or product owner.

Another important aspect which perhaps is not caught by the process description is that the delivery of the sprint is business value. It does not have to be software. In most big projects, the first sprints might not result in so much factual software. Analysis, modeling, etc are also activities within scrum and they bring business value. It should therefore be clarified that the output not have to be software.

But yet again, wonderful initiative! Keep this up!

Hi Anna,

first, thank you very much for taking such a detailed look at my model. You are absolutely right that a release doesn't need to happen at the end of each Sprint phase, but that a product should be ready. I documented this fact in my model by including an exclusive gateway after the Sprint phase. One branch leads to a delivery and the second branch does nothing, because "no release intended".

Now I see that my description of the responsibilities of the Scrum Master might be unclear. Of course the Scrum Master is not responsible for communication, but for facilitating communication within the team. I think the role of the Scrum Master is hard to describe in a few words. He basically acts as some kind of coach within the Scrum project enabling everyone to work together.

It is very true that it is not the aim of Scrum to deliver software, but business value. In fact, this is what often happens in the first phases. For example, it is common that in the first Sprint only the overall product design and architecture is delivered. In my post, I focused on software only to make the Scrum concept easier to understand. But you are right, this is a simplification, which might not be very good.

Again, thank you very much for your input!

Sebastian

ah. I understood this as a not accepted delivery; a k a that the product owner does not think the delivery meets the requirements. But I'm quite new to the ARIS notation since I'm really a beginner

<offtopic> I love this kind of content discussions that goes beyond ARIS usage, and would love to see more of this here at ariscommunity </offtopic>

thank you, Roland. We're in the process of documenting our owen development process so this is a welcome discussion for me.

Hi Sebastian

I am having some problems in opening or viewing your documents/models.  Is there something I need to have installed?

Hi Sebastian .  I have solved the problem.

Sebastian,

I just now had a closer look at the diagram. I think the Sprint should be a call activity if we regard the process of your next related post as expanded Sprint sub-process. It may not be really reusable but having lanes could only be supported in that case.

Regards,

Ivo

I just posted a Scrum task board as ARIS Express model.

Hi Sebastion, just a question around Scrum. Lot's of scrum articles published on the web claims that the only tools you require are whiteboards and sticky notes. I'm of the opinion that models still play a big part in Agile / Scrum and would like to get your opinion on this as well?  I fail to see how you can effectively maintain an implemented solution if no models exists i.e.

• process diagrams i.e. BPMN diagrams explaing the process definition
• supporting integration architectures i.e. Archimate actor cooperation models
• Logical data models i.e. IE data models and UML class models
• UML use cases etc.