Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP)

Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) and the entire agile development methodologies seem to be a buzz in the software development world. Driving this trend is the business need for dynamic solutions at hyper fast speeds.

Scrum is a methodology developed over the last 20 years and is focused on shorter windows of time between releases in sprints of 2 – 4 weeks. In order to accomplish this there has to be essentially constant QA and refining the scope down to just a few items between each sprint and being sure these are the correct features to include in the next release. The client really likes it because they get usable software sooner and they get more communications throughout the process. I think the main drawback is that some of the overall architecture is going to suffer. It looks like the direction the industry is headed so if you are involved in software development you probably want to take a closer look.

Here is a description of Scrum in Wikipedia and a link for the complete Wikipedia article:

Scrum (development)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Scrum is an iterative incremental process of software development commonly used with agile software development. Despite the fact that "Scrum" is not an acronym, some companies implementing the process have been known to adhere to an all capital letter expression of the word, i.e. SCRUM. This may be due to one of Ken Schwaber's early papers capitalizing SCRUM in the title.[1]

Although Scrum was intended for management of software development projects, it can be used to run software maintenance teams, or as a program management approach.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)