In Part 1 we extensively covered   the basics about Scrum, Agile Manifesto , the Principles, facts and myths about Scrum and the roles within the team. 

In this post we will concentrate on understanding  and will do a deep dive analysis of:

- Scrum Events
- Scrum Activity - Backlog Grooming
​- Scrum Activity - Slack

Scrum events are designed to enable critical transparency, inspection, regularity, and adaptation. You must prefer to use these predefined meetings with fixed objectives and maximum durations instead of ad-hoc meetings, which most likely waste our time.

There are just five events in a Scrum Project:

1. Sprint: Each Scrum project is a set of Sprints. A Sprint is a container for the four other events (as represented in the above diagram), development effort, and the maintenance of the Product Backlog.

2. Sprint Planning: Sprint Planning is the first event inside a Sprint. The Scrum Team plans the items they are going to deliver in the Sprint and the way they will deliver them.

3. Daily Scrum: The Development Team starts working on the objectives of the Sprint as soon as Sprint Planning is completed. During the Sprint, the Development Team holds a daily meeting (normally 15 minutes) to coordinate the work for the next 24 hours. This meeting is called the Daily Scrum.

4. Sprint Review: Before the end of the Sprint, the Development Team presents (demonstrates) the outcome of the Sprint to the customer and receives feedback. This meeting is called Sprint Review (also known as Sprint Demo).

5. Sprint Retrospective: After the Sprint Review and just before the Sprint is over, the Development Team holds an internal meeting to review the Sprint and use it to improve the process (lessons learned) in the next Sprint. This meeting is called Sprint Retrospective.

Time Box is an essential concept in Agile methods, a predefined fixed maximum duration of time in order to maximize productivity in which we freeze the target and work with full focus on certain tasks or objectives. Time-boxed events  repeat many times, until the final goal of the project is achieved. All the changes are applied only when one time-box is finished and we are ready to start the next one.

The duration of a time-box should be agreed upon and fixed. We are free to change the duration based on lessons learned, but not frequently, and never based on single occasions. For example, we are not allowed to say that “we have a lot to do this time, so let’s increase the duration for this particular case”.

What we are allowed to say is “based on the previous ten time-boxes, we realized that the duration of our time-boxes is not suitable, and a 30% increase in duration might better fit our needs. So, let’s increase them from now on”.

After some thought i have decided to write and share some of the basics about Scrum. A lot of people have different views, theories and ways of doing things which they call Scrum. While i do not contest some of those practices but its essential to understand the concepts and strongly agree that every organization team will need to mold and churn some process to make things work. 

So in this series of blogposts, the first one will be addressing the following:

- Scrum and Agile
- Agile Manifesto
​- Agile Principles
- When to use Scrum VS other Methods
- Facts and Fibs about Scrum
- Scrum Timeline
- Scrum Roles and Team

At a later time, i'll share the more advanced stuff and also touch base with SAFE.

It is not possible in some projects (especially in IT projects) to gather all the requirements upfront because of their extreme uncertainties. Therefore, we need a project management method flexible enough to deal with many change requests that appear during the project and keep the project team productive.

There are a number of systems designed to provide these two properties, and a group of them are called Agile Frameworks. Scrum is a project management method of the Agile group; it is the most famous and the most broadly used one.

Scrum is based on a certain process, which i'll explain in the next few blogposts as we progress. This Scrum process will not be effective, unless it is combined with certain roles and artifacts.

Given the diversity of operating systems supported by Docker and the differences between .NET Framework and .NET Core, you should target a specific OS and specific versions depending on the framework you are using.

For Windows, you can use Windows Server Core or Windows Nano Server. These Windows versions provide different characteristics (IIS in Windows Server Core versus a self-hosted web server like Kestrel in Nano Server) that might be needed by .NET Framework or .NET Core, respectively.

For Linux, multiple distros are available and supported in official .NET Docker images (like Debian). In the image below  you can see the possible OS version depending on the .NET framework used.

You can also create your own Docker image in cases where you want to use a different Linux distro or where you want an image with versions not provided by Microsoft. For example, you might create an image with ASP.NET Core running on the traditional .NET Framework and Windows Server Core, which is a not-so-common scenario for Docker.

When you add the image name to your Dockerfile file, you can select the operating system and version depending on the tag you use, as in the following examples:

I have come across this issue of Date and Time  in SharePoint that i feel like writing an email to Microsoft for making this the most confusing thing ever . 

When you create a Date column you have the choice of Date and Date & Time.

Note the keyword “Format” in that option. Even if you select “Date Only”, your users can still type, or copy and paste, a date and a time and it will be stored as a date and time. But… only the date will be displayed.

After considerable amount of wasting my effort and countless guess work, i came to understand that Times are represented as parts of a day.

You should use .NET Core, with Linux or Windows Containers, for your containerized Docker server application when:

•  You have cross-platform needs. For example, you want to use both Linux and Windows Containers.
•  Your application architecture is based on microservices.
• You need to start containers fast and want a small footprint per container to achieve better density or more containers per hardware unit in order to lower your costs.
  

In short, when you create new containerized .NET applications, you should consider.NET Core as the default choice. It has many benefits and fits best with the containers philosophy and style of working. An additional benefit of using .NET Core is that you can run side by side .NET versions for applications within the same machine. This benefit is more important for servers or VMs that do not use containers, because containers isolate the versions of .NET that the app needs. (As long as they are compatible with the underlying OS.)

You should use .NET Framework for your containerized Docker server application when:

•  Your application currently uses .NET Framework and has strong dependencies on Windows.
•  You need to use Windows APIs that are not supported by .NET Core.
• You need to use third-party .NET libraries or NuGet packages that are not available for .NET Core.

Using .NET Framework on Docker can improve your deployment experiences by minimizing deployment issues. This “lift and shift” scenario is important for containerizing legacy applications that were originally developed with the traditional .NET Framework, like ASP.NET WebForms, MVC web apps or WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) services.