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74 Chapter 3 Agile software development

‘Scrum master’ is a facilitator who arranges daily meetings, tracks the backlog of
work to be done, records decisions, measures progress against the backlog, and com-
municates with customers and management outside of the team.
The whole team attends the daily meetings, which are sometimes ‘stand-up’
meetings to keep them short and focused. During the meeting, all team members
share information, describe their progress since the last meeting, problems that have
arisen, and what is planned for the following day. This means that everyone on the
team knows what is going on and, if problems arise, can replan short-term work to
cope with them. Everyone participates in this short-term planning—there is no top-
down direction from the Scrum master.
There are many anecdotal reports of the successful use of Scrum available on the
Web. Rising and Janoff (2000) discuss its successful use in a telecommunication
software development environment, and they list its advantages as follows:

1. The product is broken down into a set of manageable and understandable
chunks.
2. Unstable requirements do not hold up progress.
3. The whole team has visibility of everything and consequently team communica-
tion is improved.
4. Customers see on-time delivery of increments and gain feedback on how the
product works.
5. Trust between customers and developers is established and a positive culture is
created in which everyone expects the project to succeed.

Scrum, as originally designed, was intended for use with co-located teams where
all team members could get together every day in stand-up meetings. However,
much software development now involves distributed teams with team members
located in different places around the world. Consequently, there are various experi-
ments going on to develop Scrum for distributed development environments (Smits
and Pshigoda, 2007; Sutherland et al., 2007).

3.5 Scaling agile methods

Agile methods were developed for use by small programming teams who could
work together in the same room and communicate informally. Agile methods have
therefore been mostly used for the development of small and medium-sized systems.
Of course, the need for faster delivery of software, which is more suited to customer
needs, also applies to larger systems. Consequently, there has been a great deal of
interest in scaling agile methods to cope with larger systems, developed by large
organizations.