Agile/Scrum Elevator Speech

Oct-26-2007

Post written by Chris Spagnuolo. Follow Chris on Twitter Add comment

This week I was asked to give an extremely brief description of agile practices and Scrum. I had about 30 seconds to respond. I think I did pretty well under pressure and came up with something along the lines of:

“It’s a framework of practices…no, more like guidelines, that help us deliver useful, valuable increments of functional software to our customers on a very frequent basis, like two weeks, in a completely transparent environment. We do it by constantly re-prioritizing requirements and reviewing our incremental progress with our customer. We also continually inspect and adapt our development practices to increase both our efficiency and our our effectiveness.”

Three sentences, 22 seconds. Did I capture the essence of agile and Scrum? I hope so.

Just what is the essence of Scrum anyway (and no, it’s definitely not a new fragrance for agile developers). HL Arledge took a shot at it on his blog recently. My challenge to my fellow scrummers is this: Come up with your best description of agile practices and scrum in 3 sentences or less. Post them in the comments section of this post. In your post, feel free to link to your blog, your company, your product or your dog, if you’d like. Give yourself a shout-out.

The best elevator speech about agile and scrum wins a $10 gift card to Starbucks.