Scrum: A Comprehensive Tutorial

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2 Learn More About Scrum – Agile & Scrum Basis

Scrum is a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.

Scrum itself is a simple framework for effective team collaboration on complex products. Scrum co-creators Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland have written The Scrum Guide to explain Scrum clearly and succinctly. This Guide contains the definition of Scrum. This definition consists of Scrum’s roles, events, artifacts, and the rules that bind them together.

The Scrum Process

In agile projects, a sprint is a consistent iteration of time in which the development team creates a specific group of product capabilities from start to finish. At the end of each sprint, the functionality that the development team has created should be working, ready to demonstrate, and potentially shippable to the customer.

Sprints should be the same length within a project. Keeping the sprint lengths consistent helps the development team measure its performance and plan better at each new sprint.

Sprints generally last one to four weeks. Four weeks is the longest amount of time any sprint should last; longer iterations make changes riskier, defeating the purpose of being agile. We rarely see sprints lasting longer than two weeks, and more often see sprints lasting a week. One-week sprints are a natural cycle with the Monday-to-Friday business week that structurally prevents weekend work.

Some scrum teams work in one-day sprints where priorities change on a daily basis. Market and customer needs are changing more and more quickly, and the amount of time you can afford between opportunities to gather customer feedback only gets shorter.

Our rule of thumb is that your sprint shouldn’t be longer than your stakeholders can consistently go without changes in priority regarding what the scrum team should be working on in the sprint.

Each sprint includes the following
Sprint planning at the beginning of the sprint Daily scrum meetings
Development time — the bulk of the sprint
A sprint review and a sprint retrospective at the end of the sprint