What is scrum ? – A simple (non-technical) definition

Well, for those of you who play rugby, it’s not what you think. In software development, scrum (of as some people like to call it with capital letters, SCRUM) is a relatively newer technique, a part of agile development methodologies. Scrum aims to merge the differences between the different constituents of a software development team (primarily the Dev and QE), and make them into one single solid team that works together to develop the software. This helps in reducing some of the tension that normally builds up between team members, and fosters a much higher degree of communication between the team members.
Scrum also takes pride in being a technique which allows for very fast incorporation of changing requirements, accepting that demanding that requirements be frozen before the start of the development process may not be a realistic approach. Instead, you break the work down into 2-4 week long development timelines, and at the start of every new such cycle, you review the requirements at that point of time.
Some of the terms that appear during scrum are ‘backlog’, ‘sprint’, ‘ScrumMaster’, ‘ProductOwner’, ‘Team’, ‘User Story’, ‘Daily Scrum’, ‘Sprint Planning Meeting’, etc. (these will be explained in future posts).