Scrum explained in brief

Scrum is a framework for Agile development. Scrum can be defined in terms of the following:.

Roles:
Product owner
Scrum master
Development team

Activities:
Sprint planning
Daily scrum
Sprint review
Sprint retrospective
Product backlog grooming

Artifacts:
Sprints
Product backlog
Sprint backlog

Product Owner: Central point of leadership and ownership. Product owner interacts with end users, internal stake holders, the scrum master and also the development team. He determines which features are most essential to go into the product. Grooming the product backlog is the scrum masters job.

Scrum Master: Helps team members understand scrum principles and acts as coach. Any team issues should be resolved by the scrum master. Also impediments should be removed by the scrum master. A manager should not be a scrum master, since a scrum master has no authority over the team.

Development Team: Does the actual coding. Consists of developers who follow the scrum principles. Typically there should not be more than nine team members and no less than four.

Sprint planning: Happens are the beginning of every sprint. A print goal is defined in sprint planning, and a few product backlog items are picked for development. The product owner and the development team agree on the tasks to be done in a given sprint. Sprints should run at a sustainable pace. Each feature should be broken down into a bunch of tasks. Tasks should have an estimate on the amount of time. Also individual developers pick tasks during sprint planning.

Daily scrum: A very short daily meeting in which you say three things, what you worked on yesterday, what you are working on today, and if there are any blockers to your work. This should be a very short meeting, ideally not more than 15 minutes.

Sprint review: Second last activity that happens at the end of the sprint. Product that was developed on in the sprint is reviewed.

Product backlog grooming: Items from the product backlog are added or removed, this should be done as frequently as needed. Estimating is done in product backlog grooming. Estimating is the process of figuring out how long a particular coding task will take. Generally speaking relative sizes are used to express workload. For instance task A will take twice as long to complete as task B.

Sprint retrospective: Happens at the end of the sprint, wherein the team reviews the sprint process. Any changes that need to be made to the process should be discussed in this step.

Sprints: Work is performed in scrum in iterative cycles, these are called sprints. Typical sprints last 2 weeks. They have a star date and an end date and are hence time bound.

Product backlog: Is a prioritized list of features that are wanted in the product. May represent weeks or months worth of work. Most valuable work is always done first. This is a constantly evolving list of items.

For additional details read Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process http://amzn.to/17wU55E