Here is a comparison of roles in Agile Scrum to characters in Star Wars:
- Product Owner - Princess Leia: Represents the business, prioritizes requirements (messages for Obi-Wan), and steers the vision.
- Scrum Master - Obi-Wan Kenobi: Acts as a servant leader, facilitates meetings and intra-team relationships, trains and coaches the team, removes impediments (uses the Force!), and protects the team (from the Dark Side).
- Development Team - Rebel fighters: Self-organizing, cross-functional team that does the actual work of designing, developing and testing increments of releasable functionality. Skilled in the Force and willing to take on the Empire!
- Stakeholders - The Rebel Alliance and Galactic Senate: Interested in the project and outcome but not directly involved in the day-to-day work. Provide funding and set high-level goals
Combined with some basic concepts:
- Requirements (User Stories) - Messages carried by R2-D2: Expressed as short narratives from a user perspective, prioritized based on business value. R2 dutifully carries messages back and forth.
- Tasks (To-Do's) - Assignments handed out to rebel pilots: Specific units of work that need to be done to complete user stories and sprint goals. Fighter pilots receive tactical objectives to achieve larger strategic goals.
- Estimations (Story Points) - Navigating with lightspeed: Relative sizing of user stories to determine how much work can be done in a sprint. Hyperspace jumps require calculations to plot a route and navigate obstacles.
- Velocity - Speed of X-wing and TIE fighters: The total story points completed in a sprint, used to determine how much work the team can tackle in future sprints. Dogfights and quick maneuvers need fast starfighters!
- Releases - Destroying the Death Star: New functionality released into production, ideally every Sprint, to provide value to the customer. Major accomplishment that takes a coordinated attack!