You put your document in, you take your use-case out

It's time to do the methodology shuffle again. This time around it's Scrum.
An agile methodology which is light on overhead (arent't they all) and strong on team-working (again ditto). What seems appealing about Scrum is that it lacks the obvious lunatic elements of XP. Sorry, I meant to say, it doesn't require the same level of rigor as XP (that everyone eventually stops doing anyway - cos it's like hard and stuff).

So what does it give you, well unfortunately at this point we don't know much more that the details of the methodology and some feedback from external projects that use it (or variants of it). So time to pilot it, adapt it to our culture, review and improve.

In essence Scrum is a to-do feature list. You organise your product features by priority. You then give this off to the Scrum team, they take the first chunk (sprint) and then beaver away for up to 6 weeks knocking tasks off the sprint. By the end you have a milestone.

So good for dividing a big long process into discrete demonstrable chunks.
There's also a strong team ethic. Daily Scrum meetings where people are asked three questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What will you do today?
• Is there anything blocking you?

They then resolve the difference, add / delete tasks as they progress and continue.

So not a hell of a lot of difference between this and iterative/phased development. Some nice new team-building practices, easy metric gathering and clear separation between overall planning an phase / sprint planning.

Of course the devil is in the detail and it's the tension between an overall product planning process and the sprint / phase planning that seems to be the least explained.

Anyway, should be fun finding out how it all really hangs together in the real world.