Scrum

Glossary term descrip­tion

Scrum is an iter­a­tive and incre­men­tal approach to devel­op­ing prod­ucts and man­ag­ing work. As a sim­ple and light­weight agile frame­work, it serves for man­ag­ing com­plex prod­uct and ser­vice devel­op­ment.

The team model in Scrum is designed to opti­mize flex­i­bil­ity, cre­ativ­ity, and pro­duc­tiv­ity. Scrum teams usu­ally con­sist of a Prod­uct Owner, the Devel­op­ment Team and a Scrum Mas­ter.

The Prod­uct Owner is account­able for max­i­miz­ing the value of the prod­uct by man­ag­ing the Prod­uct Back­log, which is a descrip­tion of prod­uct fea­tures ordered by the value they add to the prod­uct. He rep­re­sents the busi­ness, cus­tomers or users, and guides the team toward build­ing the right prod­uct.

The cross-func­tional Devel­op­ment Team is doing the actual devel­op­ment work in a self-orga­niz­ing man­ner. It chooses itself how best to accom­plish the work, rather than being directed by oth­ers out­side the team. As a cross-func­tional team, it com­prises all com­pe­ten­cies needed to accom­plish the work with­out depend­ing on oth­ers not part of the team.

A Scrum Mas­ter keeps up the con­stant flow of the work by help­ing the team to remove obsta­cles and pro­mot­ing and sup­port­ing the Scrum prac­tices, rules, and val­ues.

Scrum helps to always keep­ing a strong focus on the out­comes of the pro­ject and min­i­miz­ing the need for meet­ings and other over­head not defined in Scrum . The work is char­ac­ter­ized by pre­scribed, reg­u­larly re-occur­ring and time-boxed events. It is done in con­sec­u­tive cycles called Sprints.

The goal of each Sprint is address­ing one ore more busi­ness prob­lems, and adding accord­ing busi­ness value to the result­ing prod­uct. Once a Sprint begins, its dura­tion is fixed and can­not be short­ened or length­ened. Addi­tion­ally, a num­ber of Sprint related time-boxed events ensure an appro­pri­ate amount of time is spent to keep­ing the work in flow, with­out allow­ing waste in the process:

  • Sprint Plan­ning
  • Daily Scrum
  • Sprint Review
  • Sprint Ret­ro­spec­tive