Scrum Fundamentals

Stripped to its essence, Scrum is an approach to delivering software.  Nothing more, nothing less.

There are many approaches to developing software.   At one end, you can have a very formal ‘waterfall’ style approach where the development lifecycle consists of major phases that follow one another.  These phases include the Requirements Phase, where the project analyses and documents what the stakeholders need.  The next phase would be the design phase, where designers design the system to be built, which once built will deliver the requirements identified in the Requirements Phase.

After the Design Phase comes the Build Phase.  This is where the actual product get built, based on the specifications produced from the Design Phase.  Once built, the product gets tested in the Test Phase, in order to ensure the quality of the built product.

The phases in the waterfall approach are very logically  structured.  Each phase produces exactly what the next phase requires.  From arguments based on reason alone, it seems to be the perfect approach. 

In reality, however, the above approach is riddled with inefficiencies and problems, not due to the phases themselves, but because they are performed by fallible human beings, using fallible communication methods.  

Perhaps the most commonly cited problem is that very often, the product that comes out at the end meets the specifications, which in turn meets the requirements, but somehow ends up not being what the end users wanted or expected.

The lack of feedback between the stakeholders and the product being built – as it’s being built – contributes in no small part, to the problem.

Agile, and in particular, Scrum, proposes to fix the above problem by increasing the visibility of the product being built, while it’s being built.

We can illustrate Scrum at a very high level in the IDEF0 format as shown.

The output of a Scrum process is working software.  The inputs are a vision of the product, and of course time and money.

The process is executed by the Scrum Team, who relies heavily on the Product Owner, who represents the business stakeholders and from whom comes the Vision of the product.

Scrum comes with a set of techniques and procedures, and guided by the principles espoused in the Agile Manifesto.  You execute Scrum using these techniques.  In theory, you get working software, and the software that is guaranteed to be what the customer wants.

How does Scrum do that?  We’ll start exploring beginning with the next post on this topic.