Scrum is not an acronym – it actually comes from Rugby. A scrum or scrummage is way of restarting the game after the ball has gone out of play. Scrum was first mentioned in “The New Product Development Game” (Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 1986). Today some of the world’s leading companies are using Scrum development process including Yahoo, Google and (don’t tell Bill Gates) Microsoft.

How it works

Scrum as a development process is simple. Its been clear over time the the best results come from small cross-functional teams. Its also been clear that customers and stakeholders never know what they want really until they see the software in action. No matter how many times we explain and agree on the value of wireframes and sign-off, RUP or other iterative phase-gated methodologies it never works, we always figure things out as we use them. Scrum allows us to get functionality out to the users, stakeholders and expert early to shape the solution. It reduces the huge amount of cost and time spend documenting and refining requirements, building wireframes and prototypes.

The Process

The process starts with a Story – or a customer focused narrative describing the functionality and its features & benefits. From that a backlog of work to be done is developed, the team prioritizes the tasks, decides on a fixed set of backlog tasks to be implemented in a short series of iterations or sprints. The Scrum team meets daily to to discuss progress and remaining work, and has brief sprint meeting to discuss the previous sprint and plan or revise future sprints.

Roles

Scrum roles are divided into pigs and chickens. The pig roles include the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and the Scrum Team while the chicken roles include the users, stakeholders and consulting experts.

Conclusion

Now the challenge is to re-educate business owners and service organizations. Scrum is Web Development 2.0 because it gives the users a voice in the development process and allow for social shaping of features. Flickr is a great example of how release early and often has molded the solution into what the community wants. The bigger the community the better the feedback. We need to trust the users as co-developers.

Google Tech Talks September 5, 2006 – Scrum et al.

Ken Schwaber co-developed the Agile process, Scrum. He is a founder of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, and signatory to the Agile Manifesto. Ken has been a software developer for over thirty years. He is an active advocate and evangelist for Agile processes. This seminar presents the basic framework of Scrum and some of the implementation issues associated with it.