• Agile & Scrum Basics

What exactly is Scrum? The short answer

Scrum: what is it? That’s an important question. It’s a framework of roles, tools and meetings. It’s a natural approach that allows you to quickly and agilely add value to products and services. Scrum was created in 1995 by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber.

Scrum brings structure so your team can be productive in complex, changeable environments. You get a handle on complexity by approaching big ambitious goals with small steps and learning from each step. This not only allows you to back up assumptions with facts, but you also get results much faster.

Complex issues require a multidisciplinary approach. Scrum helps you collaborate with different disciplines. When the whole team is focused on the goal, everyone can contribute maximally from his or her discipline.

5 Benefits of working with Scrum

1. Active teams

Working with Scrum is working in a multidisciplinary, self-organizing team. Everyone is actively involved in planning, distributing tasks and identifying obstacles. It helps strike a balance between planning and productivity. Because the team does this themselves, they are much more engaged in the work.

2. Flexibility

With Scrum, added value is more important than executing a plan. It helps to create a flexible plan. The plan contains enough room for important things that come up in between.

3. Short time, working product

The result of a sprint is an improvement to a product or service that can potentially go to market. No waiting months for a release or new version, but having the solution you need quickly.

4. Insightful progress

Scrum work is all about achieving concrete goals. The goals are set jointly for each sprint. Every day, the team discusses the work, the state of affairs and chooses the best plan of action to achieve the next goal. In this way, customers and stakeholders always know where they stand.

5. Do not develop unnecessarily

With Scrum working, you develop only what really adds value. As a result, the chance of a large project that can never be put to use is almost zero. What is valuable? You get more and more grip on that during development. This is because with Scrum, you learn very quickly from your end users. Ultimately, it leads to the end result being a product that exceeds customer expectations.

Roll

It is an approach with three roles, two overviews and five types of meetings. Within the framework, we distinguish the following roles:

Product Owner: The Product Owner is responsible for adding value. It is someone who takes into account the needs of the organization and customers. The Product Owner follows trends and developments within the market and speeds up the process with good decisions. The Product Owner works with the Scrum Master to ensure that the development team has a full sense of the product’s vision.

Scrum Master: The Scrum Master ensures that Scrum continues to improve. The goal is to coach the Scrum Team to maximum results. The Scrum Master helps the team facilitate the Scrum meetings.

Developers: The team consists of about 3 to 9 people who collectively have all the skills needed to make a good product. They enthusiastically build added value every day.

These three roles together are the Team. Some important facts about a Scrum Team:

• Team members feel a shared responsibility;
• The atmosphere within the team is motivating, transparent and open;
• Each team member always knows the progress of the project;
• A Team has learned something after every sprint.