Agile : Scrum Team

Better way of working

What is Scrum? Scrum is a way for teams to work together to develop a product. Product development, using Scrum, occurs in small pieces, with each piece building upon previously created pieces. Building products one small piece at a time encourages creativity and enables teams to respond to feedback and change, to build exactly and only what is needed.
More specifically, Scrum is a simple framework for effective team collaboration on complex projects. Scrum provides a small set of rules that create just enough structure for teams to be able to focus their innovation on solving what might otherwise be an insurmountable challenge.
However, Scrum is much more than a simple framework. Scrum supports our need to be human at work: to belong, to learn, to do, to create and be creative, to grow, to improve, and to interact with other people. In other words, Scrum leverages the innate traits and characteristics in people to allow them to do great things together.

How does Scrum Work?

Building complex products for customers is an inherently difficult task. Scrum provides structure to allow teams to deal with that difficulty. However, the fundamental process is incredibly simple, and at its core is governed by 3 primary roles.

1. Product Owners determine what needs to be built in the next 30 days or less.
2. Development Teams build what is needed in 30 days (or less), and then demonstrate what they have built. Based on this demonstration, the Product Owner determines what to build next.
3. Scrum Masters ensure this process happens as smoothly as possible, and continually help improve the process, the team and the product being created.

While this is an incredibly simplified view of how Scrum works, it captures the essence of this highly productive approach for team collaboration and product development.

 Scrum Team

A Scrum team in a Scrum environment does not include any of the traditional software engineering roles such as programmer, designer, tester or architect. Everyone on the project works together to complete the set of work they have collectively committed to complete within a sprint. Because of this, Scrum teams develop a deep form of camaraderie and a feeling that "we're all in this together."
Former roles in traditional teams often adapt to an agile role that makes them an integral Scrum team member who retains some of the aspects of their prior role, but also adds new traits as well. New roles in a Scrum team are the ScrumMaster or product owner. You can find out more about which role in a Scrum team would suit you here by finding your pre-agile role.
A typical Scrum team is five to nine people. Rather than scaling by having a large team, Scrum projects scale through having teams of teams. In this way, we have worked on projects with more than 500 people and have consulted on projects with more than 1,000.