Benefits of Using Scrum

Successful Scrum implementations have many benefits for teams and management. Scrum does, however, require a change from the status quo.

A well-functioning Scrum will deliver the highest business value features first and will avoid building features that will never be used by the customer. Since industry data shows that about half of the software features developed are never used, development can be completed in half the time by avoiding waste, or unnecessary work.
In most companies, development is slowed down by issues identified as impediments during the daily meetings or planning and review meetings. With Scrum, these impediments are prioritized and systematically removed, further increasing productivity and quality. Well-run Scrums achieve the Toyota effect: four times industry average productivity and twelve times better quality.

Scrum removes management pressure from teams. Teams are allowed to select their own work, and then self-organize through close communication and mutual agreement within the team on how best to accomplish the work. In a successful Scrum, this autonomy can significantly improve the quality of life for developers and enhance employee retention for managers.

The simple rules of Scrum allow for continual inspection, adaptation, self-organization, and emergence of innovation. This can produce an exciting product for the customer, develop high team spirit and satisfying work, generate high productivity and customer satisfaction, and achieve the market and financial goals of the company. As a result, Scrum is being widely adopted worldwide in companies large and small, localized or distributed, open source or proprietary, for virtually any type or size of project.

Certified ScrumMaster Trainer Craig Larman notes that "Scrum is arguably the oldest and most widely applied agile and iterative method, with an emphasis on iterative and adaptive PM practices." He goes on to say that Scrum has been applied in thousands of organizations and domains since the early 1990s, on projects large and small, from Yahoo to Medtronics to Primavera, with great results. These results can only happen, though, when leadership commits to the required changes: teams that adopt Scrum must move away from command-control and wishful-thinking-predictive management. Larman says that Scrum can be easily integrated with practices from other iterative methods, such as those from the Unified Process and Extreme Programming, including test-driven development, agile modeling, use cases, user stories, and so forth. Larman concludes, "On the surface, Scrum appears to be simple, but its emphasis on continuing inspect-adapt improvement cycles and self-organizing systems has subtle implications."



Original Version: http://www.scrumalliance.org/view/benefits_of_scrum
Original Author: http://www.scrumalliance.com