What is Scrum?
Scrum is a project management method for agile software development.
SCRUM Values
The SCRUM values are derived from the Agile values of software development.
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools - processes and tools are helpful, but they will do you no good if the team does not communicate and collaborate in a constructive fashion.
- Working software over comprehensive documentation - documentation is important, but what's most important is to have working software.
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation - you are not just looking to get a contract and get money that way - you are solving the customer's problem.
- Responding to change over following a plan - if the requirements or perceived requirements changed, so should the plans and design.
Scrum is a set of interrelated practices and rules that optimize the development environment, reduce organizational overhead, and closely synchronize market requirements with iterative prototypes. 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.
The main roles in scrum are the ScrumMaster who maintains the processes and works similar to a project manager, the Product Owner who represents the stakeholders and the Team which includes the developers.
During each sprint, a 15-30 day period (length decided by the team), the team creates an increment of shippable software. The set of features that go into each sprint come from the product backlog, which is a prioritized set of high level requirements of work to be done. What backlog items go into the sprint is determined during the sprint planning meeting. During this meeting the Product Owner informs what items in the product backlog that he wants completed. The team then determines how much of this they can commit to complete during the next sprint.
During the sprint, the team completes the fixed set of items called backlog items. During the sprint no one is able to change the backlog, which means that the requirements are frozen for sprint.
The product backlog is a high-level document for the entire project. It contains broad descriptions of all required features, wish-list items, etc. It is the "What" that will be built. It is open and editable by anyone. It contains rough estimates, usually in days. This estimate helps the Product Owner to gauge the timeline and, to a limited extent, priority .
The sprint backlog is a greatly detailed document containing information about how the team is going to implement the requirements for the upcoming sprint. Tasks are broken down into hours with no task being more than 16 hours. If a task is greater than 16 hours, it should be broken down further. Tasks on the sprint backlog are never assigned, rather tasks are signed-up for by the team members as they like.
Scrum is facilitated by a ScrumMaster, whose primary job is to remove impediments to the ability of the team to deliver the sprint goal
links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/architecture/scrum.aspx#Introduction0