Scaling Scrum with Nexus

One of the pertinent questions in the IT industry today is, “What is Nexus?” How it benefits the organization in terms of software delivery?

Nexus is an instructive framework that resides above scrum with some rules and events that helps in scaling the scrum with team size between 3 and 9.

Let’s say, eight teams are working toward a common goal, all the teams can be brought together under one roof towards the same goal through Nexus. The common goal is broken into small chunks called user stories; these user stories are then allocated proportionally to each team.

Nexus sprint planning is the initial phase where the user stories are pulled from product backlog and then are assigned to individual scrum teams. But, even before that, Nexus scrum master should start visualizing different pivotal roles played by members in the team, so as to achieve the set deliverables.

Planning and aligning the work to each scrum team in the current sprint is the biggest challenge during this phase. This challenge can be handled by listing out the cross-team dependencies, and defining a sprint goal that can be achieved by the teams at the end of sprint.

Nexus Sprint Backlog will contain the product backlog items, which the team has committed to complete in the sprint timeline. From there, the user stories are allocated to the individual scrum teams during the sprint. The scrum master who represents the individual teams, has the responsibility to pull the right amount of work into the sprint. Sprint backlog then, should be updated continuously during the sprint in order to have transparency and also to help the team managing their ongoing work.

Nexus Integration Team: In Nexus, the individual teams’ development work should be integrated into a common environment that can be tested to ensure that the integration is done. This integration is specifically done by a qualified team either on a daily basis or before the completion of the sprint. Many challenges will be encountered during this phase such as dependencies, issues faced by multiple teams in this integrated environment, continuous integration and environment management. Members of this integration team should have proper training, so as to identify and resolve these challenges during every sprint.

Nexus Daily Scrum: During the Nexus daily scrum, the individual scrum teams will give an update on the following questions.

• Was the previous day’s work successfully integrated? If not, then why not?
• What are the dependencies or impacts that have been identified?
• Any project related information that needs to be shared across teams in the Nexus?

Nexus Sprint Review: During this phase, the project is assessed against the sprint goal determined during the sprint planning meeting. This is usually done at the end of the sprint conducted by the Nexus scrum master. The individual team representatives or either scrum master will participate to review the integrated and incremental development of the product with the respective product owners.

Then, a comparison of estimated work vs Actual and Project Budget will be presented by the Scrum master during this phase. The end result of this meeting might result in adjusting the delivery deadline, or adjusting the Nexus sprint backlog based on the valuable inputs or suggestions provided by each representative.

Nexus Sprint Retrospective: This phase is conducted after the end of sprint. Again, each representative from all the individual teams will participate in this particular meeting to discuss on the technical or process glitches that happened during the sprint. They should arrive with a plan that collates, list of improvements required in the forthcoming sprints.

Addressing the following questions will categorize the transparent issues that impacted the sprint.

• What went good with the Sprint?
• What went bad during the Sprint?
• What could be improved?
• Action items for Improvement?

In essence, Nexus has only few alterations or add-ons when compared with Scrum but, it certainly adds substantial value to the software development process with each incremental approach. This helps in delivering a high-quality product with an increase in value to the customers.