brian's blog

From eWeek, Microsoft Lauds 'Scrum' Method for Software Projects:

Galen said a typical scrum team is made up of between five to 10 people, although there could be more. The team then works in Scrum "sprints" of about 30 days to complete a particular task or set of tasks for a particular milestone.

The team meets daily for 15-minute standup meetings and then they go off to work on their portions of the project. And although there is a "scrum master" or project manager-like position on the team, "self-organization is key to scrum," Galen said.

We just finished a busy 30 day "sprint" in our team, releasing a number of critical bugfixes for MSN Movies and support for a new label's music videos at MSN Music. I was the Scrum Master, which embarrassingly sounds like some sort of nerdy Dungeons and Dragons title. (Or perhaps a great gamer tag on the Xbox 360?)

A flexible and frequently revised development methodology is badly needed at a place like Microsoft, because it sucks to work on a project for 9 months, only to find it scrapped due to a shifting business landscape. Scrum is an improvement, though we still need to work some sort of planning & design process into the project prior to the start of a sprint.