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What are the rules of scrum?


A relatively new person to scrum asked me this question last day. My answer to that person was yes. But really does the scrum have any rules? Scrum is a framework which helps us in developing software. It has very few rules and apart from those basic rules rest of them are guidelines like best practices.

Some of the rules 

  1. The roles of Scrum
    • Scrum Master - http://www.theagileschool.com/2012/03/scrummasters-checklist-roles.html
    • Product Owner
    • Feature Team
  2. The PDCA cycle (http://www.theagileschool.com/2012/05/pdca-scrum-or-agile-why-is-it-important.html )  frequent communication about risks (daily)
    • Plan – Sprint planning
    • Do – Actual engineering sprint – deliver a potential shippable code
    • Check – Sprint review
    • Act – Retrospective 

The scrum guide @ http://www.scrum.org/Scrum-Guides will be a good guideline for teams/companies planning to start scrum. If you are following the recommendation in these then you are following scrum.
Apart from these rest of the ceremonies and artifacts are there to help us improve the process. They are best practices. We can make changes in those to adapt to our needs. As we do scrum we will find problems, do a review and act on it, change the process and measure the success.

As your understanding of scrum improves,  you may changes few things. Check The agile manifesto http://agilemanifesto.org/ and see if the changes are in accordance with the principles. If yes go and make those changes, if the changes are against the principles discuss about that, talk to learned people (or contact me :D ). After the brainstorming session you may have a better idea. Implement it and measure the progress. Scrum is journey, you may have to adapt it according to your needs

Some other Guidelines




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