Scrum (project management)

Scrum is an agile team collaboration framework commonly used in software development and other industries. Scrum prescribes for teams to break work into goals to be completed within time-boxed iterations, called sprints. Each sprint is no longer than one month and commonly lasts two weeks. The scrum team assesses progress in time-boxed, stand-up meetings of up to 15 minutes, called daily scrums. At the end of the sprint, the team holds two further meetings: one sprint review to demonstrate the work for stakeholders and solicit feedback, and one internal sprint retrospective. A person in charge of a scrum team is typically called a scrum master. Scrum teams should be cross-functional and self-managing. Unlike sequential approaches, scrum is an iterative and incremental framework for product development. Scrum allows for continuous feedback and flexibility, requiring teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration, and mandating frequent communication among all team members. The flexible approach of scrum is based in part on the notion of requirement volatility, that stakeholders will change their requirements as the project evolves.

History The use of the term scrum in software development came from a 1986 Harvard Business Review paper titled "The New New Product Development Game" by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. Based on case studies from manufacturing firms in the automotive, photocopier, and printer industries, the authors outlined a new approach to product development for increased speed and flexibility. They called this the rugby approach, as the process involves a single cross-functional team operating across multiple overlapping phases in which the team "tries to go the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth". The authors later developed scrum in their book, The Knowledge Creating Company. In the early 1990s, Ken Schwaber used what would become scrum at his company, Advanced Development Methods. Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales, and Jeff McKenna developed a similar approach at Easel Corporation, referring to the approach with the term scrum. Sutherland and Schwaber later worked together to integrate their ideas into a single framework, formally known as scrum. Schwaber and Sutherland tested scrum and continually improved it, leading to the publication of a research paper in 1995, and the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in 2001. Schwaber also collaborated with Babatunde Ogunnaike at DuPont Research Station and the University of Delaware to develop Scrum. Ogunnaike believed that software development projects could often fail when initial conditions changed if product management was not rooted in empirical practice. In 2002, Schwaber with others founded the Scrum Alliance and set up the Certified Scrum accreditation series. Schwaber left the Scrum Alliance in late 2009 and subsequently founded Scrum.org, which oversees the parallel Professional Scrum accreditation series. Since 2009, a public document called The Scrum Guide has been published and updated by Schwaber and Sutherland. It has been revised six times, with the most recent version having been published in November 2020.

Scrum team A scrum team is organized into at least three categories of individuals: the product owner, developers, and the scrum master. The product owner liaises with stakeholders, those who have an interest in the project's outcome, to communicate tasks and expectations with developers. Developers in a scrum team organize work by themselves, with the facilitation of a scrum master.

Product owner Each scrum team has one product owner. The product owner focuses on the business side of product development and spends the majority of time liaising with stakeholders and the team. The role is intended to primarily represent the product's stakeholders, the voice of the customer, or the desires of a committee, and bears responsibility for the delivery of business results. Product owners manage the product backlog and are responsible for maximizing the value that a team delivers. However, it is the developers, not the product owner, who decide how much to do in each sprint and how to accomplish it.

Developers In scrum, the term developer or team member refers to anyone who plays a role in the development and support of the product and can include researchers, architects, designers, programmers, etc.

Scrum master Scrum is facilitated by a scrum master, whose role is to educate and coach teams about scrum theory and practice. Scrum masters have differing roles and responsibilities from team leads or project managers; project managers often have people management responsibilities, which a scrum master does not. Scrum teams do not involve project managers to maximize self-organisation among developers.

Workflow

Sprint

A sprint (also known as a design sprint, iteration, or timebox) is a fixed period of time wherein team members work on a specific goal. Each sprint is normally between one week and one month, with two weeks being the most common. The goal of the sprint should be to produce something that is tangible and "done", and the goal is treated as immutable to give the team certainty. If the goal needs to be changed due to a change in external priorities, the product owner or the team can terminate the sprint and start a new sprint with a new goal. Each sprint starts with a sprint planning event in which a sprint goal is defined and priorities are chosen out of the backlog. The suggested maximum duration of sprint planning is two hours for each week in the sprint. Each sprint ends with a sprint review, where progress is shown to stakeholders to elicit their feedback, and a sprint retrospective where the team identifies lessons and improvements for upcoming sprints.

Daily scrum

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