Scrum in a nutshell

In order to successfully develop software and deliver it on time as well, you need a solid project approach that works for your company. At ePower we've been using Scrum for a couple of years now and this agile project approach has already proven its strength.

A simple framework

Scrum is made up of three roles, three ceremonies, and three artifacts.

• Three roles: the product owner, who is responsible for the business value of the project; the Scrum master, who ensures that the team is functional and productive; and the self-organized team.
• Three ceremonies: the sprint planning meeting, daily scrum meetings, and sprint review meetings.
• Three artifacts for prioritizing and tracking tasks: the product backlog, the sprint backlog, and a burndown chart.

What is Scrum?

Scrum is an agile software development framework. A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need.

During each sprint, typically a two to four week period, the team creates potentially shippable 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 wants completed. The team then determines how much of the items they can commit to complete during the next sprint. The selected items compose the sprint backlog. 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 during the sprint review meeting.

Advantages of Scrum

• Scrum enables the creation of self-organizing teams and encourages verbal communication across all team members who are involved in the project.
• Deliver results in a short period of time (from 2 to 4 weeks).
• Quickly adapt the software to the changing needs of the customer.