Scrum practices and values put emphasis on collaboration and communication. The performance appraisal creates an agenda divide as the employee uses it to try to highlight his or her performance in order to get raises and promotions, while the manager uses the appraisal to divvy up scarce departmental resources. Both agendas can be a motivation for conscious or subconscious distortion of the data, or to behaviors that ultimately benefit the person doing them, but not the company or customer. The appraisal fosters low trust competition in the team rather than self-organizing to meet customer needs.

The product backlog is a list that contains and prioritizes the details of every little task you require to include in your product. If you want to make any changes to your product, then product backlog is the only source of requirements. A product backlog never completes; you have to work on the product backlog list continually. The product backlog continuously evolves to recognize what your product requires to be perfect, useful, and worth the competition.

The product owner is the only owner of the product backlog. When it comes to maintaining and organizing the product backlog, the product owner holds complete accountability. While ordering the backlog, the product owner may get influenced by customer priority, difficulty in relative implementation, the urgency of receiving feedback, etc. An efficient product owner will look for feedback from the development team, customers, and designers to optimize product delivery.

The Scrum Master, the Scrum Team, and other Stakeholders contribute to having a broad and complete To-Do list. You can allow other cross-functional team members to contribute items to the product backlog.

Product Backlog refinement is an ongoing process in which the Product Owner and the Development Team collaborate on reviewing and revising detail, estimates, and orders for items in the Product Backlog.

The Scrum Team decides how and when refinement is done. Refinement usually consumes no more than 10% of the capacity of the Development Team. However, Product Backlog items can be updated at any time by the Product Owner or at the Product Owner’s discretion. The Product Owner isn’t part of the Development Team and can invest as much time as necessary and enlist the help of other members of the Scrum Team.

Empiricism in Scrum is an approach whereby the team continuously learns and improves from mistakes. In Scrum, empiricism means that the team makes decisions and changes based on what the customer is experiencing, rather than what the developers intended them to experience. Additionally, the empiricism meaning in Scrum is the concept that customer feedback directly impacts the team’s actions.

Sprint is a short period in which a team works to produce an end deliverable. Within each sprint, there are Scrum inspect and adapt events. Also known as ceremonies, these meetings are held by the Scrum team to clarify the purpose, progress, and results of a particular sprint. There are four Scrum inspect and adapt events in total: sprint planning, daily Scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective.

Scrum Master Responsibilities:
1. Implement Project Management/Best Practices;
2. Keep all Parties on Track and Informed;
3. Introduce Agile Engineering Practices;
4. Coach Team Members;
5. Host Daily Stand-up Meetings;
6. Assist the Product Owner With the Product Backlog. It is the product owner’s responsibility to create and maintain the product backlog. The Scrum Master helps the product owner refine and maintain the backlog by using information gathered from standup meetings. They schedule review meetings and prioritize work on user stories.
7. Remove Roadblocks;
8. Teach Scrum Practices and Principles.

“A Scrum Master leads through influence, not authority.”

Agile scrum artifacts are information that a scrum team and stakeholders use to detail the product being developed, actions to produce it, and the actions performed during the project. The main agile scrum artifacts are product backlog, sprint backlog, and increments.

The term artifact is often associated with archaeological ruins and ancient relics. Yet in software development, the term artifact refers to key information needed during the development of a product.

Agile scrum artifacts are information that a scrum team and stakeholders use to detail the product being developed, actions to produce it, and the actions performed during the project. These artifacts provide metadata points that give insight into the performance of a sprint. They are essential tools for every scrum team since they enable core scrum attributes of transparency, inspection, and adaption.

As new information is learned, the team must negotiate with the Product Owner regardless of what it is. If the Developers feel strongly about something they think something needs adjusting, they are responsible for communicating the changes to the Product Owner before acting.

A Product Owner must be an expert in the business domain and industry. To understand customer requirements better and translate them into product requirements, a Product Owner must be well-versed in business logic as well as the technical capabilities of the product. It is a diverse role that requires a mix of several skills and experience for high performance.

If the Product Owner has this authority, he can respond to the changing needs of the customer and the marketplace. If not, he is blocked from being effective and may need approval on all Product Backlog Item decisions which causes a waste of time, by the Product Owner, and waste in the effort, by the Scrum Team.

The product owner is a technical role. You can’t become a great PO if you don’t know the ins and outs of development, design, agile framework, software development, scrum approach, and IT infrastructure. Technical skill is defined as a specialized skill that is used to perform a specific task such as programming and software development. The agile product owner must be technically sound because backlog management and prioritization are technical tasks. It can’t be done effectively if the PO doesn’t understand the development and design processes and has no knowledge of how software development works.

Product Owner’s need is almost there on all the events except Daily Scrum because Daily Scrum is a time-boxed event for the Development Team to inspect and adapt daily. When a Product Owner is not available during the Sprint, it is one of the great impediments. It will certainly affect the ability of the Development Team to come up with a “done” product increment. If there is no Product Increment at the end of the Sprint, then the Sprint Goal cannot be reached.

Only the Development Team can change its Sprint Backlog during a Sprint. If the Product Owner wants to change the work planned, he has to do this per the Development Team.

The Sprint Backlog is, ultimately, a plan for the Sprint. The development team executing work inside of a Sprint creates a Sprint Backlog. The creation occurs during the Sprint Planning. The central question is, how does this work get done? The Product Owner presents a list of prioritized items from the Product Backlog. The team will analyze the list, do capacity management, figure out what they can do, and make a plan to execute. The Sprint Backlog is a plan to achieve the overall goals of the Sprint.

True leadership is a representation of the way you work with your team to achieve goals. A true leader makes an effort to help develop their team's skills so they can reach their full potential. They lead by example and establish strong, trusting relationships to ensure success within the team and for the organization as a whole.

With frequent inspection, the team can spot when their work deviates outside of acceptable limits and adapt their process or the product under development.

A Sprint Goal is the result of a Sprint or what the Sprint should seek to achieve.

After the Development Team forecasts the Product Backlog items it will deliver in the Sprint, the Scrum Team crafts a Sprint Goal.