Scrum

The literature on Scrum explains that agile is on the edge of chaos, obtaining the creative benefits of chaos, but with enought stability to make steady progress.

The key is to get product management to agree to short periods of time called sprints or iterations where:

  1. the team works on totally completing a small number of highest priority small mini-requirements (called stories) - this includes definition, testing, implementation and customer acceptance,
  2. the requirements that the team is working on cannot change during the iteration,
  3. anything else can change, but only effects the stories for future iterations.
The originally recommended iteration length was a month. The most common practice today is 2 weeks. 1 week is workable, but 1 day iterations seems out of the question given the complexity of the software development.

Scrum Links

Scrum Documents

Scrum Applications