Agile Methodologies-Use and Benefits

Scrum is an agile approach for developing innovative products and services. Scrum is frame work for organizing and managing work. The scrum framework is based on set of values principles and practices that provide the foundation of an organization which will add its unique implementation of relevant engineering practices with specific approaches for realizing the scrum process.( Essential Scrum: A practical guide to the most popular Agile process-Kenneth S. Rubin)

Though scrum is most commonly used to develop software products, the core values and principles of Scrum can and are being used to develop different types of products or to organize the flow of various types of work.

Scrum

1) Creates the opportunity to measure and suggest very practice and enables to introduce change for improvement.

2) Gives practical tools to measure the productiveness of team.

3) Doctrine-Scrum uses insert and adapt cycle that enable team and stakeholders to respond to emerging knowledge and changing conditions in real time using actual data.

4) Emergence-the sprint review and planning cycles is designed to maximize emergence of features in agile project methodology.

5) Prioritization- some features are more important to the stakeholders than others. Rather than approaching the project by implementing everything in the beginning stage, scrum allows to priorities during the agile process.

The Scrum team

Consists of Scrum Master, product owner, and team

Scrum master – is responsible for educating team about scrum, ensuring the members follow the practices established for them. The scrum master facilitates problem solving and runs interface for the team.

The product owner- is responsible of communicating the vision of the project and maximizing the return on investment. The product owner maximizes ROI by establishing and prioritizing the desirable features in product backlog.

Development team-delivers set of features from the product backlog; they determine how much work can be committed at the start of the sprint and take responsibility to deliver the completed work by end.

The scrum team completes the sprint by performing two aspects i.e. inspect and adapt activities. The first being the sprint review, the stakeholders and scrum team inspect the product that is built and second sprint by demonstration- here the scrum team inspects the scrum process being used to create the product. At this point Scrum sprint cycle repeats and the development team determines the next important set of product backlog item to complete. After completion of few sprints, the product as per owner's vision will be realized.

Extreme programming (XP)- is an agile software development methodology