What is scrum methodology?

When it comes to the agile software development practices, the “scrum” is what that comes to our ears! The scrum development methodology is not new to us, it is something that we have been witnessing over the years in the field of the software engineering. 

This article has been dedicated to the scrum methodology! Scrum is a very vast topic to be discussed in detail in an article of short length! Here in this article we have tried to give you a glimpse of what is scrum methodology actually. 

Evolution of Scrum Methodology

- Scrum being an agile software development is supposed to follow a methodology based up on the iterative and incremental model of development. 

- Over the years the scrum development methodology has made the development and management of the software products and projects. 

- The birth of the software development was seen as an approach towards the commercial production of the software products thus making a remarkable improvement in the flexibility and speed. 

- The cross functionality and self organized teams are considered to be the best ones to perform the scrum development. 

- Initially the scrum development methodology was known as the rugby or the holistic approach to development. 

- The rugby approach was first replaced with the name scrum methodology in the year of 1995 when the a paper describing this methodology was presented in the “business object design and implementation work shop” by the Schwaber and Sutherland. 

- This workshop was conducted as a part of the OOPSLA ’95. Scrum consists of some of predefined roles and methods that regulate the whole development process. 

Roles in Scrum Development

The pre defined roles in the scrum development have been categorized in to two categories as we have discussed below:

1. The Scrum Master: As the role itself suggests this person is responsible for taking the charge of the whole development process.
2. The Product Owner: This role is also self justifying but does not refers to a single person, rather it includes all those people who are to be benefitted by the software product on the terms on which it has been agreed up on.
3. The development team: The scrum development team is one that has the characteristics like cross functionality and self organizing.

Terminology used in Scrum Methodology

Now we shall discuss some terminology of the scrum methodology:

1. Sprint: Like so many cells together form a tissue, similarly many iterations or sprints together make up the sprint development cycle. Like all the other software development processes the sprints or the iterations in the scrum process are time boxed. And also like what happens in all the other agile software development processes, here also a sprint planning meeting is conducted before the starting of the sprint. The features that have to be incorporated in to the software system in a particular sprint are obtained from the product back log.

2. Story time: This is the time spent by the whole team grooming the back logs. The existing block usage efforts and points are estimated during this time thus chalking out  a whole new acceptance criteria for the individual stories. 

3. Daily Scrum: This is a sort of a project meeting that takes during the sprint and is also known as the daily stand up. Certain guidelines are must to be followed in this meeting:

(i)   Meeting should start at the exact time.

(ii) The participation of the core roles is mandatory.

(iii)Meeting should not exceed 15 minutes.

(iv)Meeting should take place at a fixed place every time. 

(v)  Each member must answer the below mentioned 3 questions:

(a)  What have you done?

(b)  What do you plan to do today?

(c)  Do you see any stumbling blocks?