The Project Manager's Guide to Mastering Agile: Principles and Practices for an Adaptive Approach

3 Scrum Overview

SCRUM HAS BECOME RAPIDLY ACCEPTED as the most widely used agile methodology in the United States and its usage is rapidly expanding in other areas of the world as well. It provides a good general foundation that can be adapted to fit a very broad range of projects. Scrum is also not limited to software development, but that is where it is most widely used at the current time. For that reason, much of the discussion in this book will be focused on software development, but it should be understood that agile and Scrum are not limited to software development. For example, I used a Scrum approach to plan and organize the writing of this book.

Scrum, is, by definition, an empirical process as opposed to a “defined and predictive process.” The following is how these two types of processes are different:

1. Empirical process. The empirical process control model was defined to exercise or control the process via following some frequent adaptations as well as frequent inspections. It works best in situations with high levels of uncertainty where it is difficult, if not impossible, to clearly define the solution in advance and an experimental, trial-and-error approach is needed to converge on an acceptable solution. The term empirical process control model is based on the word empirical, which means the information is acquired by the means of experimentation and observation.¹
2. Defined and predictive process. “The defined process control model can be thought of as a theoretical ...