Ready, set, Scrum!

In rugby the Scrum is like the huddle in American (or Canadian) football. It represents the team frequently coming together discussing common goals and then going off to achieve them.  Agile software development concepts are having great success in developing software rapidly and with high quality.

Discussed as part of this eWeek article, the Scrum method is winning advocates across IT, including Microsoft itself.  Steve Ballmer feels that Scrum and agile development in general are ways for Microsoft to turn out final products faster.

I found this section of the eWeek article to be a very good explanation, at a high level, of Scrum:

Robert Galen, principal consultant at RGalen Consulting Group LLC, Cary, NC, said Scrum "comes from the rugby notion of the scrum, which is to have the entire team get together and huddle, and then break and do their individual tasks."

Galen said a typical scrum team is made up of between five to 10 people, although there could be more. The team then works in Scrum "sprints" of about 30 days to complete a particular task or set of tasks for a particular milestone.

The team meets daily for 15-minute standup meetings and then they go off to work on their portions of the project. And although there is a "scrum master" or project manager-like position on the team, "self-organization is key to scrum," Galen said.

Scrum efforts do not work well with "a General Patton, but more of a Bill Belichick," Galen said, speaking of the New England Patriots head coach who is known for fostering teamwork.

Meanwhile, at the Software Test & Performance conference earlier this month in New York, Galen said he has used the Scrum process not only for developing applications, but also to test them for quality assurance sign-off.

Interestingly, I think I've been scrumming for years.  In past efforts my teams would often share responsibilities for key portions of development giving each person ownership of the entire project. It works extremely well at shortening timelines (or making up lost time when something has gone off the rails). Regardless, this kind of distributed team effort certainly appears to have a lot of promise.

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