Scrum is an iterative incremental framework for managing complex work (such as new product development) commonly used with agile software development. Although the word is not an acronym, some companies implementing the process have been known to spell it with capital letters as SCRUM. This may be due to one of Ken Schwaber's early papers, which capitalized SCRUM in the title.
Although Scrum was intended for management of software development projects, it can be used to run software maintenance teams, or as a general project/program management approach.
History
In 1986, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka described a new holistic approach that increases speed and flexibility in commercial new product development. They compare this new holistic approach, in which the phases strongly overlap and the whole process is performed by one cross-functional team across the different phases, to rugby, where the whole team "tries to go to the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth". The case studies come from the automotive, photo machine, computer and printer industries.
In 1991, DeGrace and Stahl, in Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions , referred to this approach as Scrum, a rugby term mentioned in the article by Takeuchi and Nonaka. In the early 1990s, Ken Schwaber used an approach that led to Scrum at his company, Advanced Development Methods. At the same time, Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales, and Jeff McKenna developed a similar approach at Easel Corporation and were the first to call it Scrum. In 1995 Sutherland and Schwaber jointly presented a paper describing Scrum at OOPSLA '95 in Austin, TX, its first public appearance. Schwaber and Sutherland collaborated during the following years to merge the above writings, their experiences, and industry best practices into what is now known as Scrum. In 2001, Schwaber teamed up with Mike Beedle to describe the method in the book Agile Software Development with Scrum .
Characteristics
Scrum is a "process skeleton," which contains sets of practices and predefined roles. The main roles in Scrum are:
- the " ScrumMaster ", who maintains the processes (typically in lieu of a project manager);
- the " Product Owner ", who represents the stakeholders;
- the " Team ", a cross-functional group of about 7 people who do the actual analysis, design, implementation, testing, etc.
During each "sprint", typically a two to four week period (with the length being decided by the team), the team creates a potentially shippable product increment (for example, working and tested software). The set of features that go into a sprint come from the product "backlog," which is a prioritized set of high level requirements of work to be done. Which backlog items go into the sprint is determined during the sprint planning meeting. During this meeting, the Product Owner informs the team of the items in the product backlog that he or she wants completed. The team then determines how much of this they can commit to complete during the next sprint. During a sprint, no one is allowed to change the sprint backlog, which means that the requirements are frozen for that sprint. After a sprint is completed, the team demonstrates the use of the software.
Scrum enables the creation of self-organizing teams by encouraging co-location of all team members, and verbal communication across all team members and disciplines that are involved in the project.
A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned 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 deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.
There are several implementations of systems for managing the Scrum process, which range from yellow stickers and whiteboards, to software packages. One of Scrum's biggest advantages is that it is very easy to learn and requires little effort to start using.
Roles
Main article: The Chicken and the PigA number of roles are defined in Scrum. All roles fall into two distinct groups—pigs and chickens—based on the nature of their involvement in the development process. These groups get their names from a joke about a pig and a chicken opening a restaurant:
A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, "Hey, why don't we open a restaurant?" The pig looks back at the chicken and says, "Good idea, what do you want to call it?" The chicken thinks about it and says, "Why don't we call it 'Ham and Eggs'?" "I don't think so," says the pig, "I'd be committed, but you'd only be involved."
So the "pigs" are committed to building software regularly and frequently, while everyone else is a "chicken"—interested in the project but really indifferent because if it fails they're not the pigs—that is, they weren't the ones that committed to doing it. The needs, desires, ideas and influences of the chicken roles are taken into account, but are not in any way allowed to affect, distort or get in the way of the actual Scrum project.
"Pig" roles
The Pigs are the ones committed to the project in the Scrum process—they are the ones with "their bacon on the line."
"Chicken" roles
Chicken roles are not part of the actual Scrum process, but must be taken into account. They are people for whom the software is being built.
Meetings
At the end of a sprint cycle, two meetings are held: the "Sprint Review Meeting" and the "Sprint Retrospective"
Artifacts
Product backlog
The product backlog is a high-level document for the entire project. It contains backlog items: broad descriptions of all required features, wish-list items, etc. prioritized by business value. It is the "What" that will be built. It is open and editable by anyone and contains rough estimates of both business value and development effort. Those estimates help the Product Owner to gauge the timeline and, to a limited extent, priority. For example, if the "add spellcheck" and "add table support" features have the same business value, the one with the smallest development effort will probably have higher priority, because the ROI is higher.
The product backlog is the property of the Product Owner. Business value is set by the Product Owner. Development effort is set by the Team.
Sprint backlog
The sprint backlog is a document containing information about how the team is going to implement the features for the upcoming sprint. Features are broken down into tasks; as a best practice, tasks are normally estimated between four and sixteen hours of work. With this level of detail the whole team understands exactly what to do, and anyone can potentially pick a task from the list. Tasks on the sprint backlog are never assigned; rather, tasks are signed up for by the team members as needed, according to the set priority and the team member skills.
The sprint backlog is the property of the Team. Estimations are set by the Team. Often an according Task Board is used to see and change the state of the tasks of the current sprint, like "to do", "in progress" and "done".
Burn down
The sprint burn down chart is a publicly displayed chart showing remaining work in the sprint backlog. Updated every day, it gives a simple view of the sprint progress. It also provides quick visualizations for reference. There are also other types of burndown, for example the Release Burndown Chart that shows the amount of work left to complete the target commitment for a Product Release (normally spanning through multiple iterations) and the Alternative Release Burndown Chart , which basically does the same, but allows to show clearly scope changes into a Release Content, by resetting the baseline.
It should not be confused with an earned value chart.
Adaptive project management
The following are some general practices of Scrum:
- Customers become a part of the development team (i.e., the customer must be genuinely interested in the output).
- Scrum has frequent intermediate deliveries with working functionality, like all other forms of agile software processes. This enables the customer to get working software earlier and enables the project to change its requirements according to changing needs.
- Frequent risk and mitigation plans are developed by the development team itself—risk mitigation, monitoring and management (risk analysis) occurs at every stage and with commitment.
- Transparency in planning and module development—let everyone know who is accountable for what and by when.
- Frequent stakeholder meetings to monitor progress—balanced dashboard updates (delivery, customer, employee, process, stakeholders)
- There should be an advance warning mechanism, i.e., visibility to potential slippage or deviation ahead of time.
- No p
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