Scrum Development at DOTNUTSHELL

Scrum is a process skeleton that includes a set of practices and predefined roles during software development. The main roles in scrum are the ScrumMaster who maintains the processes and works similar to a project manager, the Product Owner who represents the stakeholders, and the Team which includes the developers. Scrum development is used at Microsoft (at a smaller scale aswell as other development techniques) at DOTNUTSHELL Technologies.

During each sprint, a 15-30 day period (length decided by the team), the team creates an increment of potential shippable (usable) software. The set of features that go into each sprint come from the product backlog, which is a prioritized set of high level requirements of work to be done. What backlog items go into the sprint is determined during the sprint planning meeting. During this meeting the Product Owner informs the team of the items in the product backlog that he wants completed. The team then determines how much of this they can commit to complete during the next sprint.During the sprint, no one is able to change the sprint backlog, which means that the requirements are frozen for sprint.

There are several good implementations of systems for managing the Scrum process and the "sprints" while others prefer to use yellow stickers and white-boards. One of Scrum's biggest advantages is that it is very easy to learn and requires little effort to start using.
Each day during the sprint, a project status meeting occurs. This is called a scrum or "the daily standup". The centre piece of Scrum is the daily scrum development meeting.

The idea is:
All are welcome, but onlyanddevelopers may speak
The meeting is timeboxed at 15 minutes regardless of the team's size
All attendees should stand (it helps to keep meeting short)
The meeting should happen at the same location and same time every day

The following is discussed:

What have you done since yesterday?
What are you planning to do by tomorrow?
Do you have any problems preventing you from accomplishing your goal? (It is the role of the ScrumMaster to remember these impediments.)

The scrum technique is particularly useful during software development and web design projects which are logically split into tasks which are performed by specific developers or teams.