Being relatively new to the Scrum way of doing things (2 projects in progress and starting a 3rd), I thought it may be useful to start a series of blog posts on our experience of Scrum. To kick off I will start with our understanding of what scrum is.
Origin:
The term Scrum comes from a study by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in 1986, which was published in the Harvard Business Review. In this paper (The New New Product Development Game) they described a holistic approach in which the development phases overlap and where project teams are made up of small cross-functional teams. They compared these high performing teams that work together towards a common goal, to the Scrum formation in rugby.
The first software development Scrum was created at Easel Corporation in 1993 by Jeff Sutherland, who used their study as the basis for team formation and adopted Scrum as the name of the process as a whole. Jeff introduced Scrum Ken Schwaber in 1995, who then formalized the process for the worldwide software industry in the first published paper on Scrum at OOPSLA 1995.
Definition:
Various definitions of Scrum exist, but the following two defines it the best.
[ScrumPapers - Nuts, Bolts, and Origins of an Agile Process by Jeff Sutherland] Scrum is a simple framework used to organize teams and get work done more productively with higher quality. It allows teams to choose the amount of work to be done and decide how best to do it, thereby providing a more enjoyable and productive working environment. Scrum focuses on prioritizing work based on business value, improving the usefulness of what is delivered, and increasing revenue, particularly early revenue. Designed to adapt to changing requirements during the development process at short, regular intervals, Scrum allows teams to prioritize customer requirements and adapt the work product in real time to customer needs. By doing this, Scrum provides what the customer wants at the time of delivery (improving customer satisfaction) while eliminating waste (work that is not highly valued by the customer).
Scrum is a simple “inspect and adapt” framework that has three roles, three ceremonies, and three artifacts designed to deliver working software in Sprints, usually 30-day iterations.
• Roles: Product Owner, ScrumMaster, Team.
• Ceremonies: Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and Daily Scrum Meeting
• Artifacts: Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and Burndown Chart
[An Overview of Scrum – Mike Cohn] Scrum is an agile process that allows us to focus on delivering the highest business value in the shortest time. It allows us to rapidly and repeatedly inspect actual working software (every two weeks to one month). The business sets the priorities. Teams self-organize to determine the best way to deliver the highest priority features. Every two weeks to a month anyone can see real working software and decide to release it as is or continue to enhance it for another sprint.
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