Tuesday, November 3, 2015

All About SCRUM and How It Affects Your Life

Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development methodology for managing product development. It defines "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal"[this quote needs a citation], challenges assumptions of the "traditional, sequential approach"[this quote needs a citation] to product development, and enables teams to self-organize by encouraging physical co-location or close online collaboration of all team members, as well as daily face-to-face communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.
 A key principle of scrum is its recognition that during production processes, 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.

Scrum was first defined as "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal" as opposed to a "traditional, sequential approach" in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in the New Product Development Game. Takeuchi and Nonaka later argued in The Knowledge Creating Company that it is a form of "organizational knowledge creation, especially good at bringing about innovation continuously, incrementally and spirally".

The authors described a new approach to commercial product development that would increase speed and flexibility, based on case studies from manufacturing firms in the automotive, photocopier and printer industries. They called this the holistic or rugby approach, as the whole process is performed by one cross-functional team across multiple overlapping phases, where the team "tries to go the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth". (In rugby football, a scrum refers to a tight-packed formation of players with their heads down who attempt to gain possession of the ball.)

In the early 1990s, Ken Schwaber used what would become scrum at his company, Advanced Development Methods, and Jeff Sutherland, with John Scumniotales and Jeff McKenna, developed a similar approach at Easel Corporation, and were the first to refer to it using the single word scrum. In 1995, Sutherland and Schwaber jointly presented a paper describing the scrum methodology at the Business Object Design and Implementation Workshop held as part of Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications '95 (OOPSLA '95) in Austin, Texas, its first public presentation. 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 worked with Mike Beedle to describe the method in the book Agile Software Development with Scrum. Its approach to planning and managing projects is to bring decision-making authority to the level of operation properties and certainties. 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.

Later, Schwaber with others founded the Scrum Alliance and created the Certified Scrum Master programs and its derivatives. Schwaber left the Scrum Alliance in the fall of 2009, and founded Scrum.org with Alex Armstrong to further improve the quality and effectiveness of scrum.

If you’d like to know about SCRUM Certification, go to www.leapuniversity.biz for more info.

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Tempe Arizona 85284


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