Introduction To Scrum - Type of Agile Software Development

Scrum is an agile method for project management developed by Ken Schwaber. Its goal is to dramatically improve productivity in teams previously paralyzed by heavier, process-laden methodologies. Its intended use is for management of software development projects as well as a wrapper to other software development methodologies such as Extreme Programming.Scrum is a lightweight management framework with broad applicability for managing and controlling iterative and incremental projects of all types. With Scrum, projects progress via a series of iterations called sprints. Each sprint is typically 2-4 weeks long. Scrum is ideally suited for projects with rapidly changing or highly emergent requirements.

A scrum team is typically made up of between five and nine people, but Scrum projects can easily scale into the hundreds. The team does not include any of the traditional software engineering roles such as programmer, designer, tester, or architect.
- The product owner is the project’s key stakeholder and represents users, customers and others in the process.
- The ScrumMaster is responsible for making sure the team is as productive as possible.
- The product backlog is a prioritized features list containing every desired feature or change to the product.
- At the start of each sprint, a sprint planning meeting is held during which the product owner prioritizes the product backlog, and the scrum team selects the work they can complete during the coming sprint. That work is then moved from the product backlog to the sprint backlog, which is the list of tasks needed to complete the product backlog items the team has committed to complete in the sprint.
- Each day during the sprint, a brief meeting called the daily scrum is conducted. This meeting helps set the context for each day’s work and helps the team stay on track.
- At the end of each sprint, the team demonstrates the completed functionality at a sprint review meeting, during which, the team shows what they accomplished during the sprint.

Scrum enables the creation of self-organizing teams by encouraging verbal communication across all team members and across all disciplines that are involved in the project. A key principle of scrum is its recognition that fundamentally empirical challenges cannot be addressed successfully in a traditional "process control" manner.