Scrum is an agile method for project management. Scrum was named as a project management style in auto and consumer product manufacturing companies by Takeuchi and Nonaka in “The New New Product Development Game” (Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 1986). Jeff Sutherland documented, conceived and implemented Scrum as it is described below at Easel Corporation in 1993, incorporating team managment styles noted by Takeuchi and Nonaka. In 1995, Ken Schwaber formalized the definition of Scrum and helped deploy it worldwide in software development.
The Scrum process was first applied to software by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. It has been most thoroughly documented in the book Agile Software Development with Scrum by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle.
Scrum works because it is a highly-empowering process that allows requirements and self-organizing teams to emerge. In their book, Schwaber and Beedle describe Scrum as an empirical process that uses frequent inspection (daily meetings), collaboration and adaptive responses. They contrast this to defined processes in which every task and outcome is defined. Defined processes work only when the inputs to the process can be perfectly defined and there is very little noise, ambiguity or change. If that doesn’t sound like the software projects you work on, look into Scrum.
Its intended use is for management of software development projects, and it has been successfully used to “wrap” Extreme Programming and other development methodologies. However, it can theoretically be applied to any context where a group of people need to work together to achieve a common goal - such as setting up a small school, scientific research projects or planning a wedding.
Although scrum was intended to be for management of software development projects, it can be used in running maintenance teams, or as a program management approach: scrum of scrums.
Characteristics of Scrum
- A living backlog of prioritized work to be done;
- Completion of a largely fixed set of backlog items in a series of short iterations or sprints;
- A brief daily meeting or scrum, at which progress is explained, upcoming work is described and impediments are raised.
- A brief planning session in which the backlog items for the sprint will be defined.
- A brief heartbeat retrospective, at which all team members reflect about the past sprint.
Scrum is facilitated by a ScrumMaster, whose primary job is to remove impediments to the ability of the team to deliver the sprint goal. The ScrumMaster is not the leader of the team (as they are self-organising) but acts as a productivity buffer between the team and any destabilising influences.
Scrum enables the creation of self-organising 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. As such, scrum adopts an empirical approach - accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to respond in an agile manner to emerging challenges.
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