What Is Scrum and Why Should You Do It?

For the past tow years, I have practice Scrum in my organization. Let me share with you some of my experiences.

What Is Scrum?
Scrum is an iterative incremental managing framework for complex projects.

Projects are controlled through ongoing measurement and control of backlog, issues, risk, problems and changes. A deliverable product is always ready through the use of constant builds and testing in parallel with development. Small teams develop component-based systems with clean interfaces.

The main roles in Scrum are:

1. "ScrumMaster", who maintains the processes (typically project manager)
2. "Product Owner", who represents the stakeholders
3. "Team", a cross-functional group people (5-9) who do the actual analysis, design, implementation, testing, etc.

Meetings

1. Daily Scrum
Each day during the sprint, a project status meeting occurs. The meeting is timeboxed to 15 minutes and discussion is restricted to the three SCRUM questions:
• What did you do yesterday?
• What will you do today?
• What obstacles got in your way?
The meeting should happen at the same location and same time every day.
2. Scrum of Scrums
• These meetings allow PM to discuss about teams work, focusing especially on areas of overlap and integration
• Weekly meetings
3. Sprint Planning Meeting
At the beginning of the sprint cycle (usually 2-4 weeks) the following actions are taken:
• Select what work is to be done
• Prepare the Sprint Backlog that details the time it will take to do that work, with the entire teamIdentify and communicate how much of the work is likely to be done during the current sprint
• Timebox limited (4 hours)
4. Sprint Review Meeting
• Review the work that was completed and not completed
• Present the completed work to the stakeholders (a.k.a. "the demo")
• Incomplete work cannot be demonstrated 
• TimeBox (2 hours)
5. Sprint Retrospective
• All team members reflect on the past sprint
• Make continuous process improvements
• Two main questions are asked in the sprint retrospective: What went well during the sprint? What could be improved in the next sprint?
• Timebox (2 hours)

Artifacts

1. Product backlog
It contains backlog items: broad descriptions of all required features, wish-list items, etc. prioritized by business value. Those estimates help the Product Owner to gauge the timeline and, to a limited extent, priority.
2. Sprint backlog
It is a document containing information about how the team is going to implement the features for the upcoming sprint. Features are broken down into tasks; as a best practice, tasks are normally estimated between four and sixteen hours of work.
3. Burn down
It is a publicly displayed chart showing remaining work in the sprint backlog. Updated every day, it gives a simple view of the sprint progress.

For more details see: www.scrumalliance.org

Why does Scrum Work?
The basic premise is that if you are committed to the team and the project, then you can spend time being productive instead of justifying your work. This reduces the need for meetings, reporting and authorization. It is exercised by selecting the right people, creating an open work environment, encouraging feedback, establishing an evaluation and reward program based on group performance, managing the tendency to go off in different directions early on, and tolerating mistakes. Every person on the team starts with an understanding of the problem, associates it with a range of solutions experienced and studied, then using skill, intelligence, and experience, will narrow the range to one or a few options.

Useful links:
http://www.scrumalliance.org
http://www.ambysoft.com/essays/agileProjectPlanning.html
http://pharazon.blog.com/2009/07/13/lean-agile-software-engineering/