“Apple employees talk incessantly about what

they call ‘deep collaboration’ or ‘cross-

pollination’ or ‘concurrent engineering.’
“Essentially it means that products don’t pass
from team to team. There aren’t discrete,
sequential development stages. Instead, it’s
simultaneous and organic.
“Products get worked on in parallel by all
departments at once—design, hardware,
software—in endless rounds of interdisciplinary
design reviews.”

Source: “How Apple Does It,” Time Magazine,

®
October 24, 2005 by Lev Grossman

Scrum has been used by:

• Microsoft • Apple
• Yahoo • Nielsen Media
• Google • First American Corelogic
• Electronic Arts • Qualcomm
• IBM • Texas Instruments
• Lockheed Martin • Salesforce.com
• Philips • John Deere
• Siemens • Lexis Nexis
• Nokia • Sabre
• Capital One • Salesforce.com
• BBC • Time Warner
• Intuit • Turner Broadcasting
• Oce
Scrum has been used for:
• Commercial software • Video game development
• In-house development • FDA-approved, life-critical
systems
• Contract development
• Fixed-price projects • Satellite-control software

• Financial applications • Websites

• ISO 9001-certified • Handheld software

applications • Mobile phones
• Embedded systems • Network switching
applications
• 24x7 systems with 99.999%
uptime requirements • ISV applications
• the Joint Strike Fighter • Some of the largest
applications in use

Characteristics
• Self-organizing teams
• Product progresses in a series of month-long
“sprints”
• Requirements are captured as items in a list of
“product backlog”
• No specific engineering practices prescribed
• Uses generative rules to create an agile
environment for delivering projects
• One of the “agile processes”

®
Scrum 24 hours

Sprint
1-4 weeks
Sprint goal
Return
Sprint
Potentially shippable
R
Ceatnucrenl backlog product increment
G
Voifutcwhrearps
GCiftanwcrealp Vouchers
Product
backlog

®
Sprints
• Scrum projects make progress in a series of
“sprints”
• Typical duration is 2–4 weeks or a calendar
month at most

• A constant duration leads to a better rhythm

• Product is designed, coded, and tested during
the sprint

Sequential vs. overlapping

development
Requirements Design Code Test

Rather than doing all of

one thing at a time...
...Scrum teams do a little
of everything all the time

Source: “The New New Product Development Game” by Takeuchi

and Nonaka. Harvard Business Review, January 1986.
®
No changes during a sprint

Change

• Plan sprint durations around how long you can

commit to keeping change out of the sprint

Scrum framework
Roles
• Product owner
• ScrumMaster
• Team Ceremonies
• Sprint planning
• Sprint review
• Sprint retrospective
• Daily scrum meeting
Artifacts
• Product backlog
• Sprint backlog
• Burndown charts
®
Scrum framework
Roles
• Product owner
• ScrumMaster
• Team Ceremonies
• Sprint planning
• Sprint review
• Sprint retrospective
• Daily scrum meeting
Artifacts
• Product backlog
• Sprint backlog
• Burndown charts
®

Product owner
• Define the features of the product
• Makes scope vs. schedule decisions
• Responsible
project
for achieving financial goals of the

• Prioritize the product backlog

• Adjust
needed
features and priority every sprint, as

• Accept or reject work results

®
The ScrumMaster
• Responsible for enacting Scrum values
and practices
• Removes impediments
• Coaches the team to their best possible
performance
• Helps improve team productivity in any way possible
• Enable close cooperation across all roles and
functions
• Shield the team from external interference

The team
• Typically 5-9 people
• Cross-functional:
• Programmers, testers, user experience designers, etc.
• Members should be full-time
• May be exceptions (e.g., database administrator)
• Teams are self-organizing
• Ideally, no titles but rarely a possibility
• Membership should change only between sprints

®
Scrum framework
Roles
• Product owner
• ScrumMaster
• Team
Ceremonies
• Sprint planning
• Sprint review
• Sprint retrospective
• Daily scrum meeting
Artifacts
• Product backlog
• Sprint backlog
• Burndown charts
®

Sprint planning meeting

Who
• Team, ScrumMaster, & Product
Owner Sprint
Agenda goal
• Discuss top priority product
backlog items
• Team selects which to do Sprint
Why backlog
• Know what will be worked on
• Understand it enough to do it
®
Sprint planning
• Team selects items from the product backlog they can
commit to completing
• Sprint backlog is created
• Tasks are identified and each is estimated (1-16 hours)
• Collaboratively, not done alone by the ScrumMaster
• High-level design is considered
As a vacation Code the middle tier (8 hours)
planner, I want to Code the user interface (4)
Write test fixtures (4)
see photos of the Code the foo class (6)
hotels. Update performance tests (4)

The daily scrum

• Parameters
• Daily
• 15-minutes
• Stand-up
• Not for problem solving
• Whole world is invited
• Only team members, ScrumMaster, product
owner, can talk

• Helps avoid other unnecessary meetings

®
Everyone answers 3 questions
1
What did you do yesterday?

2
What will you do today?

3
Is anything in your way?

• These are not status for the ScrumMaster

• They are commitments in front of peers
®

The sprint review

• Team presents what it accomplished during
the sprint
• Typically takes the form of a demo of new
features or underlying architecture
• Informal
• 2-hour prep time rule
• No slides
• Whole team participates
• Invite the world
®
Sprint retrospective
• Periodically
working
take a look at what is and is not

• Typically around 30 minutes

• Done after every sprint
• Whole team participates
• ScrumMaster
• Product owner
• Team
• Possibly customers and others
®

Start / Stop / Continue

• Whole
like to:
team gathers and discusses what they’d

Start doing

Stop doing
This is just one
of many ways Continue doing
to do a sprint
retrospective.

®
Scrum framework
Roles
• Product owner
• ScrumMaster
• Team Ceremonies
• Sprint planning
• Sprint review
• Sprint retrospective
• Daily scrum meeting
Artifacts
• Product backlog
• Sprint backlog
• Burndown charts
®

Product backlog
• The requirements
• Athelistproject
of all desired work on

• Ideally expressed such that

each item has value to the
users or customers of the
product
• Prioritized
owner
by the product

This is the • Reprioritized

each sprint
at the start of
product backlog
®
A sample product backlog
Backlog item Estimate
Allow a guest to make a reservation 3
As a guest, I want to cancel a reservation. 5
As a guest, I want to change the dates of a
3
reservation.
As a hotel employee, I can run RevPAR
8
reports (revenue-per-available-room)
Improve exception handling 8
... 30
... 50
® © 2003–2012 Mountain Goat Software®

Sprint goal
Sprint 7
A short statement
of what the work Implement basic shopping
will be focused on cart functionality including
during the sprint add, remove, and update.

Sprint 8
The checkout process—pay
for an order, pick shipping,
order gift wrapping, etc.
®
Managing the sprint backlog
• Individuals sign up for work of their own choosing
• Work is never assigned

• Estimated work remaining is updated daily

• Any team member can add, delete or change the
sprint backlog
• Work for the sprint emerges
• If work is unclear, define a sprint backlog item with a
larger amount of time and break it down later
• Update work remaining as more becomes known
®
© 2003–2009 Mountain Goat Software®

A sprint backlog
Tasks Mon Tues Wed Thur Fri
Code the user interface 8 4 8
Code the middle tier 16 12 10 4
Test the middle tier 8 16 16 11 8
Write online help 12
Write the foo class 8 8 8 8 8
Add error logging 8 4

® © 2003–2012 Mountain Goat Software®

A sprint burndown chart
1,000

800

600
Hours

400

200

0
4/29/02

5/6/02

5/13/02

5/20/02

5/24/02
®

Tasks Mon Tues Wed Thur Fri

Code the user interface 8 4 8
Code the middle tier 16 12 10 7
Test the middle tier 8 16 16 11 8
Write online help 12

50
40
30
Hours

20
10
0
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri

® © 2003–2012 Mountain Goat Software®

Scalability
• Typical individual team is 7 ± 2 people
• Scalability comes from teams of teams
• Factors in scaling
• Type of application
• Team size
• Team dispersion
• Project duration
• Scrum has been used on projects of over 1,000
people

Scaling through the Scrum

of scrums

®
 Programmers

Testers

DBAs

UI Designers

ScrumMasters
®

A Scrum reading list

• Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn
• Agile Game Development with Scrum by Clinton Keith
• Agile Product Ownership by Roman Pichler
• Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen
• Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams by Lisa
Crispin and Janet Gregory
• Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins
• Essential Scrum by Kenneth Rubin
• Succeeding with Agile: Software Development using Scrum by Mike
Cohn
• User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn