What is Scrum?
The first question that you’ll probably want answered is: is Scrum an acronym for something? You would not be alone in thinking this; most other project management processes and techniques are acronyms. Scrum however is just a name, it’s not an acronym. Similarly, it has very little to do with rugby either, although there is a "daily meeting" that might be compared to a traditional rugby scrum.
Scrum borrows from the "agile" world through its promotion of iterative and incremental practices. It has a simple implementation that is designed to increase productivity and reduce the time it takes to benefit from a software/product development. Importantly, it embraces adaptive and empirical systems development.
That last paragraph introduced two of Scrum’s key facets: adaptive and empirical. The majority of project management methods and techniques are very prescriptive; they tie us down to a fixed sequence of events and offer little in the way of flexibility. Similarly, newer, less mature methods often claim to be a panacea, yet they lack any definitive proof or track history. Fortunately, Scrum is mature; it has a track record going back as far as 1995 and earlier. Similarly, it is scaleable: Scrum can be used on projects of any size. Whilst I will not be discussing it in this article, "Scrum teams" allow Scrum to be used to manage enterprise-level projects.
Scrum also promotes and lends itself to managing eXtreme Programming (XP) based projects. XP uses "customer on site" as a means of ensuring that the development team’s questions are answered but also to ensure that what the development team is producing what the customer actually wants.
The first question that you’ll probably want answered is: is Scrum an acronym for something? You would not be alone in thinking this; most other project management processes and techniques are acronyms. Scrum however is just a name, it’s not an acronym. Similarly, it has very little to do with rugby either, although there is a "daily meeting" that might be compared to a traditional rugby scrum.
Scrum borrows from the "agile" world through its promotion of iterative and incremental practices. It has a simple implementation that is designed to increase productivity and reduce the time it takes to benefit from a software/product development. Importantly, it embraces adaptive and empirical systems development.
That last paragraph introduced two of Scrum’s key facets: adaptive and empirical. The majority of project management methods and techniques are very prescriptive; they tie us down to a fixed sequence of events and offer little in the way of flexibility. Similarly, newer, less mature methods often claim to be a panacea, yet they lack any definitive proof or track history. Fortunately, Scrum is mature; it has a track record going back as far as 1995 and earlier. Similarly, it is scaleable: Scrum can be used on projects of any size. Whilst I will not be discussing it in this article, "Scrum teams" allow Scrum to be used to manage enterprise-level projects.
Scrum also promotes and lends itself to managing eXtreme Programming (XP) based projects. XP uses "customer on site" as a means of ensuring that the development team’s questions are answered but also to ensure that what the development team is producing what the customer actually wants.
