Scrum Methodology

Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing software projects and product or application development. Scrum focuses on project management institutions where it is difficult to plan ahead. With Scrum, projects progress via a series of iterations called sprints

The Scrum sprint itself is the main activity of a Scrum project. Scrum is an iterative and incremental process and so the project is split into a series of consecutive sprints. Each is timeboxed, usually to between one week and a calendar month.  During this time the scrum team does everything to take a small set of features from idea to coded and tested functionality.

The first activity of each sprint is a sprint planning meeting. During this meeting the product owner and team talk about the highest-priority items on the scrum product backlog. Team members figure out how many items they can commit to and then create a sprint backlog, which is a list of the tasks to perform during the sprint.

On each day of the Scrum sprint, a daily scrum meeting is attended by all team members, including the ScrumMaster and the product owner. This meeting is timeboxed to no more than fifteen minutes. During that time, team members share what they worked on the prior day, will work on today, and identify any impediments to progress. Daily scrums serve to synchronize the work of team members as they discuss the work of the sprint.

At the end of a Scrum sprint, the teams conducts a sprint review. During the sprint review, the team demonstrates the functionality added during the sprint. The goal of this meeting is to get feedback from the product owner or any users or other stakeholders who have been invited to the review. This feedback may result in changes to the freshly delivered functionality. But it may just as likely result in revising or adding items to the scrum product backlog.

Another activity performed at the end of each sprint is the sprint retrospective. The whole team participates in this meeting, including the ScrumMaster and product owner. The meeting is an opportunity to reflect on the sprint that is ending and identify opportunities to improve in the new sprint.

PS: In software development and product management, a user story is one or more sentences in the everyday or business language of the end user or user of a system that captures what a user does or needs to do as part of his or her job function. User stories are used with Agile software development methodologies as the basis for defining the functions a business system must provide, and to facilitate requirements management. It captures the 'who', 'what' and 'why' of a requirement in a simple, concise way, often limited in detail by what can be hand-written on a small paper notecard. User stories are written by or for the business user as that user's primary way to influence the functionality of the system being developed. User stories may also be written by developers to express non-functional requirements (security, performance, quality, etc.), though primarily it is the task of a product manager to ensure user stories are captured.

"As a <role>,I want <goal> so that <benefit>"