Everyone's Scrumming

The VS Core team is going to test the scrum waters starting 1 May and lasting 30 days. We plan a couple of iterations to see if this methodology works for us. I plan to provide you with some feedback about the experience. If you are not familiar with the scrum process you can get ‘Agile Project Management with Scrum’ by Ken Schwaber.

As it turns out, Ken has as site called Control Chaos that sez:

"Scrum is an agile, lightweight process that can be used to manage and control software and product development using iterative, incremental practices. Wrapping existing engineering practices, including Extreme Programming and RUP, Scrum generates the benefits of agile development with the advantages of a simple implementation. Scrum significantly increases productivity and reduces time to benefits while facilitating adaptive, empirical systems development"  

Mike Cohn has an interesting site on the Scrum Development process where he says:

"Scrum is ideally suited for projects with rapidly changing or highly emergent requirements. The work to be done on a Scrum project is listed in the Product Backlog, which is a list of all desired changes to the product. At the start of each Sprint a Sprint Planning Meeting is held during which the Product Owner prioritizes the Product Backlog and the Scrum Team selects the tasks they can complete during the coming Sprint. These tasks are then moved from the Product Backlog to the Sprint Backlog."

Another great Scrum resource is Jeff Sutherland up-to-date and educational Web site. He says:

"Takeuchi and Nonaka are Godfathers of the Scrum Agile Process since they coined the term in their seminal paper in the Harvard Business Review in 1986: Takeuchi, H. and I. Nonaka, The New New Product Development Game. Harvard Business Review, 1986(January-February)."

Are we having fun yet?