Thursday, February 14, 2008

SCRUM - The New Kid on the block!

What is Scrum?




Scrum is an Agile process that can be used to manage and control complex software and product development using iterative, incremental practices. Scrum has been used from simple projects to changing the way entire enterprises do their business. Scrum significantly increases productivity and reduces time to benefits while facilitating adaptive, empirical systems development. Scrum is an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work. It produces a potentially shippable set of functionality at the end of every iteration. It's attributes are:


  • Scrum is an agile process to manage and control development work.

  • Scrum is a wrapper for existing engineering practices.

  • Scrum is a team-based approach to iteratively, incrementally develop systems and products when requirements are rapidly changing

  • Scrum is a process that controls the chaos of conflicting interests and needs.

  • Scrum is a way to improve communications and maximize co-operation.

  • Scrum is a way to detect and cause the removal of anything that gets in the way of developing and delivering products.

  • Scrum is a way to maximize productivity.

  • Scrum is scalable from single projects to entire organizations. Scrum has controlled and organized development and implementation for multiple interrelated products and projects with over a thousand developers and implementers.

  • Scrum is a way for everyone to feel good about their job, their contributions, and that they have done the very best they possibly could.

Scrum naturally focuses an entire organization on building successful products. Without major changes -often within thirty days - teams are building useful, demonstrable product functionality. Scrum can be implemented at the beginning of a project or in the middle of a project or product development effort that is in trouble.


Scrum is a set of interrelated practices and rules that optimize the development environment, reduce organizational overhead, and closely synchronize market requirements with iterative prototyes. Based in modern process control theory, Scrum causes the best possible software to be constructed given the available resources, acceptable quality, and required release dates. Useful product functionality is delivered every thirty days as requirements, architecture, and design emerge, even when using unstable technologies.


XP@Scrum


Scrum has been employed successfully as a management wrapper for Extreme Programming engineering practices. Scrum provides the agile management mechanisms; Extreme Programming provides the integrated engineering practices. An article written by Ken Schwaber and Kane Mar on one implementation is at the Prentice Hall InformIT web site.


Benefits of xP@Scrum include:


The agile management and control mechanisms of Scrum are applicable for any type of project, including business initiatives that consist of multiple, simultaneous software development, business development, re-engineering, marketing, support, and implementation projects.



  • xp@Scrum projects fit within the overall management framework of these initiatives.

  • xP@Scrum projects realize the full benefits of self-organization; teams are iteration (or Sprint) goal directed, rather than story directed.

  • When Extreme Programming projects are wrapped by Scrum, they becomes scalable and can be run simultaneously by non-colocated teams.

  • Scrum implements in a day; Extreme Programming can be gradually implemented within the Scrum framework.

  • xp@Scrum projects benefit from ADM's business value metrics process for measuring and managing initiative ROI.

1 comment:

food junkie! said...

Hey Sailesh...

These comments may be a bit late..

Your article on Extreme Programming and Scrum is neat. I've worked on XP when i was working for EMC2 at TCS Bangalore...

We indeed followed a rigorous daily scrum process right at 9 am in the morning...and for sure over a period of 5-6 weeks, we could feel the results. The entire team was happy about this new affair.

Naseer Ahmed