Scrum (development) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaScrum is an iterative, incremental framework for project management and agile software development.

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.

[edit] History

In 1986, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka described a new holistic approach that would increase speed and flexibility in commercial new product development.[1] They compared 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 the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth". The case studies came from the automotive, photo machine, computer, and printer industries.[citation needed]

In 1991, DeGrace and Stahl, in "Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions",[2] 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.[3]

In 1995, Sutherland and Schwaber jointly presented a paper describing Scrum at OOPSLA ’95 in Austin, Texas, 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".

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.[4]

[edit] 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 and the business
  • 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 ... Read more