Oracle Development Using Scrum
I had an email through the other day from Guy Mortenson, who I used to work with at Plus Consultancy before he left to find his fortune elsewhere. Guy pointed me in the direction of "Scrum", a metholodology that his new employers are using to manage Oracle development projects.
According to the Scrum website;
"Scrum is an agile, lightweight process that can be used to manage and control software and product development. Wrapping existing engineering practices, including Extreme Programming, Scrum generates the benefits of agile development with the advantages of a simple implementation. Scrum significantly increases productivity while facilitating adaptive, empirical systems development.
Scrum is an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work. It produces a potentially shippable set of functionality at the end of every iteration
Scrum naturally focuses an entire organization on building successful products. Without major changes -often within thirty days - teams are building useful, demonstrable product functionality. Scrum can be implemented at the beginning of a project or in the middle of a project or product development effort that is in trouble."
According to Dana M. Stubben,
"Scrum is a lightweight process that is philosophically very close XP [Extreme Programming]. SCRUM focuses more effort on removing impediments with daily meetings to list any outside issues impeding progress."
Indeed the Scrum website devotes a section to the integration of Scrum with XP, stating
"Scrum has been employed successfully as a management wrapper for Extreme Programming engineering practices. Scrum provides the agile management mechanisms; Extreme Programming provides the integrated engineering practices."
whilst this presentation on Agile Methodologies (the catch-all name for metholodologies such as Extreme Programming, Scrum and Adaptive Software Development) list the main advantages of Scrum as being it's suitablility for uncontrolled activities, it's ability to maximize productivity, and the fact that projects delivered using Scrum are cheaper in price, faster in delivery and better in quality.
Scrum therefore looks to be a development methodology that only gets involved when it needs to, keeps paperwork to a minumum and works well with the current vogue for programming practices, Extreme Programming. More details can be found at the Scrum Library, by taking a look at "Agile Software Development with SCRUM" by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle, or check out Jeff Sutherlands's Scrum Log.