A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum.pdf

Agility is the word of the new millennium. As the world around us grows more complex, we strive to build more complex products. These products often consist of many components that must interact precisely through sophisticated interfaces. At the same time, these products are being used in more sophisticated, critical applications, including life-critical products such as pacemakers and nano-robots, and society-critical applications such as an intelligent energy grid. In parallel with the growth of complexity, there has been a need for increased safety, predictability, risk management, and control—both of the development process itself and the resultant products. At the same time, our need to be nimble, flexible, and adaptable has increased. Enter the era of agility. Agility first formally entered the product development arena with the publishing of the Agile Manifesto in 2001. As of 2008, more organizations are employing agile techniques and processes to develop and sustain complex products than those that continue to employ more traditional techniques. Of those using agile techniques, 84% of them employ an agile framework process, Scrum. A complexity faced by almost all large organizations is