Introduction

Welcome to Scrum For Dummies. Scrum is an agile project management framework with proven results in decreasing time to market by 30–40 percent, improving product quality, and heightening customer satisfaction — all while lowering costs 30–70 percent. Scrum accomplishes these results through integration of business and development talent, improved communication models, increased performance visibility, regular customer and stakeholder feedback, and an empirically based inspect-and-adapt mentality. You can manage even the most complex project more effectively by using scrum to increase your bottom line.

About This Book

The goal is to demonstrate explicitly how you can use scrum for any project, not just software development. This book is intended to be a field manual for the application of scrum in real-world situations. Although it covers scrum fundamentals in detail, this book also delves into how to get out and experience the amazing benefits of scrum.

Scrum is by design easy to explain, but application and mastery are often difficult. Old habits and organizational mindsets need to be shifted and new ways embraced. For this reason, we’ve included success stories so that you can see how scrum can fit into your situation.

The main thrust of understanding scrum lies in the three roles, three artifacts, and five events that form its foundation and that we cover thoroughly. We also include common practices that we use and that others in the field use so that you can choose what works best for your project.

Scrum isn’t technical. In fact, its basic tenet is common sense. In many cases, we’ve wrapped this information within the world of technology and have used technical terms to help explain this. Where useful, we’ve defined these terms.

We also cover common practices from scrum experts throughout the world. You can learn so much from others who use this framework in a seemingly limitless spectrum of projects.

Scrum falls under an umbrella of project management called agile project management. Neither scrum nor agile practices is a proper noun. Scrum is a framework for organizing your work, whereas agile is an adjective used to describe a variety of practices that conform to the values of the Agile Manifesto and to the 12 Agile Principles. Scrum and agile are not identical or interchangeable, but you frequently see them written in many sources, especially online, interchangeably. In this book, you will see terminology from both descriptions, because scrum is a frequently used subset of agile practices.

Foolish Assumptions

Several books about scrum are available, but this one differs in its practicality. Each of the authors has more than a decade of experience with agile methods and scrum, and we bring this experience to you in a practical guide. We make no assumptions about what you already know: You don’t need to be a rocket scientist or a whiz programmer; all you need are a project and passion to get it done in the best way possible. We give you examples from building jet fighters to a family organizing a vacation. We focus on the steps necessary to get scrum’s magic working for you.

Our audience includes code programmers, sales professionals, product manufacturers, executives, and midtier managers, as well as educators who are looking for a way to engage their students.

If you’re in a technology industry, you’ve probably heard the terms agile and/or scrum. Maybe you’ve even worked in a scrum environment but want to improve your skills and vocabulary in this area and to bring others in your firm along with you. If you’re not in technology, you may have heard that scrum is a great way to run projects, which is true. Perhaps scrum is new to you, and you’re searching for a way to make your project more accessible, or maybe you have a great idea burning inside and don’t know how to bring it to fruition. Whoever you are, an easy way exists to run your project, and that way is called scrum. Within these pages, we show you how to use it.

Conventions Used in This Book

If you do an online search, you may see the words agile and scrum, roles, meetings, and documents and various agile methodologies and frameworks (including scrum) capitalized. We shied away from this practice for a couple of reasons.

To start, none of these items are really proper nouns. Agile is an adjective that describes a number of items in project management: agile projects, agile teams, agile processes, and so on. But it is not a proper noun, and except in chapter or section titles, you will not see us use it that way.

For readability, we did not capitalize agile-related roles, meetings, and documents. Such terms include agile project, product owner, scrum master, development team, user stories, product backlog, and more. You may, however, see these terms capitalized in places other than this book.

Some exceptions exist. The Agile Manifesto and the Agile Principles are copyrighted material. The Agile Alliance, Scrum Alliance, and Project Management Institute are professional organizations. A Certified ScrumMaster and a PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner are professional titles.

Icons Used in This Book

The following icons in the margins indicate highlighted material that we think will be of interest to you.

Tips are ideas that we’d like you to take note of. These ideas are usually practical advice that you can apply to the given topic.

This icon is less common than the others in this book. The intent is to save you time by bringing to your attention some pitfalls that you’re better off avoiding.

If you don’t care much about the technical stuff, you can skip these paragraphs without missing much. If technical stuff is your thing, you may find these sections fascinating.

This icon marks something we’d like you to take special note of, such as a concept, idea, or best practice that we think is noteworthy.

Introduction

About This Book

Foolish Assumptions

Conventions Used in This Book

Icons Used in This Book

Beyond the Book

Where to Go from Here