Progress transparency

Various practices and artifacts of Scrum, or associated with it, aim to ensure transparency regarding the progress of product development for its participants and stakeholders, and the consequent high visibility.

When using Scrum, customers and other stakeholders become much closer and in fact collaborate with the team (or teams) in the evolution of a product. At the end of each short development cycle, they are presented with what has been created and is working. Even more critical is the fact that customers and users often receive the next most important parts of the product, and which are usable. As such, with Scrum the sense of progress is real, as it is based on something concrete. In traditional projects, on the other hand, with a detailed scope and deliveries made after long periods, progress is generally reported based on percentages or steps completed, and which are often far from reality.

Teams working with Scrum also have great visibility regarding their own progress. The feedback that a team obtains at the end of each cycle directly from customers and other stakeholders allows it to discover early on whether it is working in the right direction and how effective that work is.

Each team holds a meeting every day precisely to create transparency regarding the work for its own members, and thus becomes able to adapt to what has occurred and generate a plan for what will be accomplished until the next day.

In addition to these practices, there are tools that can be used to increase transparency regarding the progress of product development work, such as a task board and Work Monitoring Graphs, explained in the chapters Sprint Backlog and Burndown and Burnup: monitoring work, respectively.

Retrospective meetings, also held at the end of each cycle, allow teams to create transparency regarding how their work is being done. In this way, the teams themselves can monitor and adapt their practices to become more effective.