On 13, 14 January Transylvania JUG has facilitated a presentation on Scrum in Cluj-Napoca, the speaker was Gerald Williams, advocate and practitioner of agile practices and Certified Scrum Master (owner of http://www.scrumlabs.com and  http://www.projectlabs.co.uk/ ). At presentation attended ~80 people, developers, testers, project leaders and it seemed to open appetite for Scrum and Agile.

Scrum on glance:

Scrum is not an acronym, it is a set of practices and rules meant to help in development process.

Scrum is an Agile discipline and the Agile family of development methodologies was born out of a belief that an approach more grounded in human reality would yield better results. It was formalized by Ken Schwaber and Dr. Jeff Sutherland in 90's, and it's now being used by various companies (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Motorola, SAP, Cisco, etc.).

Scrum is simple, powerful, flexible and rooted in common sense, it requires maturity, focus, commitment and team work.

Scrum is an iterative, incremental process, it structures product development in cycles of work called Sprints, iterations of work which are typically 1-4 weeks in length guaranteeing early feedback.

Scrum methodology consists of three distinct phases used to control the development process.

The initial phase is Planning and System Architecture. Key steps in this phase are:

• pinning down the date at which the application should be placed in production or released to the market
• prioritizing functionality requirements (ranging from good-enough to best-possible)
• identifying the resources available for the development effort
• envisioning the application architecture
• establishing the target operating environment(s).

However, compared to other methodologies, this planning phase is conducted relatively quickly because it assumes that pragmatic managers and the course of events will require that any or all of these initial parameters will be changed during the Sprint phase.

The next phase, Sprint(s), is where Scrum radically differs from traditional enterprise application methodologies:

• the project manager establishes Sprint teams of 7 (+-2) members - during a sprint the structure of a team should not change
• each team is given its assignment(s) and all teams are told to sprint to achieve their objectives on the same day -- between 1 and 4 weeks from the start of the Sprint.
• each team can select its own tools and its own means to achieve its objectives, however, this phase is not as undisciplined as it may seem -- each team having to obey to the concept of done to successfully accomplish the Sprint
• at the end of the Sprint period all the teams meet to review their progress (including executable code delivered to date) with each other, the project manager, customers/prospects, and the enterprise's senior executives.
• at the conclusion of the review session, the project manager and his or her superiors have the opportunity to change anything and everything.

Finally, Scrum ends with the Closure phase:

• finishing system and regression testing
• developing training materials
• completing final documentation.

 As opposed to traditional methods, which try to lock in requirements during the planning phase, Scrum (and Sprints in particular) provides the development team with a tremendous amount of post-planning flexibility.