Frequently Asked Questions

1. Is Scrum a methodology?
   No – Scrum is a framework within which management and teams can do the best that they can to build any software in any environment. A number of common sense practices, processes, and techniques used within the software industry are combined into this framework.
   
2. When is Scrum appropriate?
   When a project is important and no one has confidence that any existing approach will work.
   
3. What type of projects have used Scrum and failed?
   Projects where something other than getting the software produced is more important. For instance, financial constraints may constrain the development effort to such a degree that the software cannot be delivered in time to be relevant. Or, organizational politics cause usual problems and are not removed when escalated as impediments.
   
4. What is important to the success of Scrum?
   Common sense, good engineering practices, good engineers and management, and at least one person to whom the project is so important that they are willing to be fired rather than have the project fail.
   
5. How do you handle geographically dispersed teams using Scrum?
   Daily Scrum meetings are conference called to a common, central location with speaker phone facilities. All team members attend and respond. At the end of each Sprint, the entire team meets in one location for demonstrating the increment’s results and planning the next increment.
   
6. How do I track a project’s progress when Scrum is used?
   Assess the number of product features that have been completed and are part of a release. Features that were part of a incomplete sprint, or features that are completed but not used in a release are not counted. For detailed sizing, count the function points of the released features.
   The most meaningful way of tracking a team’s progress, attend each end-of-Sprint demonstration. Cumulative increments of software are demonstrated and the team responds to detailed questions about its operation, architecture, and stability.
   
7. How do I track a team’s progress during a Sprint?
   During a Sprint, a team updates the estimated number of hours to finish a task. When the Sprint starts, this number of hours is the initially estimated hours. As work progresses, the remaining hours should decrease as work is applied, unless work is not being applied or, as work is being applied, tasks are larger than expected. A "burndown" graph with days on the Y axis and number of hours remaining on all tasks in the Sprint on the X axis provides a visual trend indicating the probability that work will be completed by the end of the Sprint.
   An empirical way of determining a team’s progress is to listen during the daily Scrum meeting. The tone of voice, the way work is being described, and the impediments give an empirical feel for a team’s progress.
   
8. When and how do I use pert charts?
   Pert charts are good for plotting overall project dependencies. However, pert charts are not used for tracking tasks during Sprints. A Sprint is sized (30 days, less than 8 workers) so that tasks can be kept track of by the team without any complicated mechanisms such as pert charts.
9. How does our standard methodology work with Scrum?
   Scrum is an iterative, incremental approach for building project deliverables. The sequence in which deliverables are built is still dictated by good engineering practices - requirements, architecture, design, and code. With Scrum, testing and documentation are performed in parallel with development, and tangible software that can be incrementally be built upon is produced by each Sprint.
10. Can I only use the daily Scrum meetings initially and move on to the other parts of Scrum later?
    Scrum is intended to improve productivity by letting teams and management be as responsive as possible to development conditions. The daily meetings are great for reducing the need for other meetings, for quick daily status, and keeping management up to speed, but without the other mechanisms the spirit and productivity of Scrum have been removed.
11. Do I need daily Scrum meetings, or can we use 3 Scrum meetings every week?
    Daily, so that management can remove impediments as soon as they occur and everyone knows what’s going on. We’ve heard suggestions about team’s emailing impediments, but that misses the point – Scrum changes management’s role from being remote, to being an immediate source of aid. The team doesn’t have to hunt for help, help is immediately available.
12. How does Scrum compare to the CMM process?
    Scrum is a framework within which an institution’s regular processes occur. Such CMM processes as testing, inspections, and requirements analysis may be used within a Scrum project. The difference, however, is that the use of these processes is determined empirically by need … if the team feels that they are needed, they are used; otherwise, they are not used.
13. What customer involvement would Scrum require?
    Because Scrum is designed to be responsive to the changing dynamics surrounding a project, the customer determines the prioritization of features at the beginning of a sprint. The customer continually provides feedback on product design throughout a sprint and, more specifically, at the end of the sprint when the implemented features are demonstrated. Optionally, the customer can sit in the daily 15-minute-(or less) Scrum meeting for project updates.
14. How is the daily Scrum meeting different from the conventional daily status meeting? It is kept to a minimum in consideration of people’s tight schedule. Participants answer 3 questions : (1) What I did in the last 24 hours? (2)What I plan to do in the next 24 hours? (3)What obstacles are standing in my way? One key element that makes the daily Scrum meeting different from other conventional daily meeting is the face-to-face hand-off of obstacles to management. The management will then remove the obstacles standing in the way of the team and product delivery.
15. How does Scrum handle complex projects made up of multiple interdependent teams running concurrently? Individual teams have their daily Scrum meeting, where core members provide updates and members from other teams can sit in to hear the progress and obstacles as they arise. Depending on the degree of interdependency among the teams, an additional Scrum meeting by designated members from each team can provide a fast and structured forum to monitor progress on cross-team requirements and issues.
16. How does Scrum reduce development cycle time? One fundamental attribute of Scrum is the formation of a cross-functional team where each member develops their aspect of the selected features concurrently. For example, members representing Testing and Documentation participate in sprints together with developers, and they produce their deliverables incrementally and iteratively in support of the sprint goals. This approach avoids the big bang that typically happens near the end of a project, and facilitates communication across all development disciplines throughout the project.