What are the Advantages of Scrum for the Client?
Scrum clearly provides many benefits for the developers, but what are its advantages for the client and other stakeholders? This is a question I faced recently in a client meeting, and to answer it I first need to define Scrum itself. In layman terms, it is a project management technique that is used with agile development projects. It aims to make projects more effective by defining the roles of team members and by providing a specific way of organising the workload over a series of short development cycles (sprints).
Benefits for the client:
Scrum's main advantage is the way it facilitates changing customer requirements. It does this by providing a flexible framework wherein new features can be added and re-prioritizations can take place without negatively affecting the project flow and team's morale.
Secondly, the system of sprints encourages regular feedback, as each sprint is followed by a review. These reviews provide opportunities for the entire team to reflect on the previous sprint and discuss improvements for the next.
Thirdly, by defining roles for team members it promotes collaboration as well as clear and open lines of communication between the developers, the client and other stakeholders.
Finally, Scrum provides a framework for work estimation, where features are estimated in units of points: each point represents a relative amount of effort required. This technique is flexible enough to allow for changes in requirements as well as changes in the development team's velocity.
However, Scrum is not suitable for all projects and has certain limitations:
It does not work with traditional software development methodologies such as Waterfall.
It cannot be fully adopted if a team is too small or too big - an ideal team would consist of 4 to 6 developers.
It cannot work effectively unless it has have full management/client support.
It requires a Scrum Master who understands the Scrum practices and is able to apply them.
Bit Zesty uses scrum and agile for Ruby on Rails application development
