From the course: Agile Foundations

Scrum overview

From the course: Agile Foundations

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Scrum overview

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- So far, you've heard me use terms such as the product owner, sprints, Scrum Master, and the product backlog. These are common terms that you'll hear with most Agile teams, but these terms are not part of the Agile Manifesto. These terms are actually from Scrum, which is the most popular Agile framework. The developers of Scrum were a key part of the group that helped write the Agile Manifesto, but the Manifesto doesn't prescribe Scrum. In fact, it goes out of it's way to generalize Agile methods into a larger mindset. So Agile is a mindset while Scrum is a way to help you embrace that mindset. Think of it this way. A lot of people like to be physically fit, so they jog or swim or take long bike rides. These are all different ways that you can achieve better fitness. You can even improve your fitness by mixing and matching some of these methods and doing something completely different. Agile, like fitness, is a mindset while jogging and biking are methods you can try to help you embrace that mindset. Some people even try a fitness framework, maybe something like CrossFit or aerobics. These mix and match jogging, running or biking into a larger framework. Scrum and Agile are basically doing the same thing. Agile is a mindset and Scrum is a framework to help you embrace that mindset. So in a sense, Scrum is to Agile in the same way that something like aerobics is to fitness. Now like aerobics, Scrum is not the only Agile framework, but it does work in a way that's slightly different from other frameworks. Scrum describes itself as an empirical process control framework. The empirical side means that Scrum runs experiments to improve the product. The shorthand for this is that Scrum teams inspect and adapt. They inspect the product and then adapt quickly if they need to make changes. So a Scrum team might learn something new and then work with the customer to quickly improve the product. As of today, Scrum is the most widely used Agile framework. That's partly because Scrum is very lightweight. A Scrum team only has three roles and should only have five events, and then there are just a few outputs for what Scrum calls artifacts. There's not much to it, and so, Scrum teams have a lot of flexibility in what they like to do with the framework. Because Scrum is so popular, a lot of the language became the default terms for Agile teams. That gets a little confusing because you'll have Agile teams that are using Scrum terms, but not actually practicing Scrum. But even with this mix-up, most teams have settled on these terms. So even though you should remember that Scrum and Agile are different, you should expect to run into these terms when you start to work on your Agile teams.

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