Sprint
A sprint is the basic unit of development in Scrum. The sprint is a "timeboxed" effort, i.e. it is restricted to a specific duration. The duration is fixed in advance for each sprint and is normally between one week and one month.
Each sprint is preceded by a planning meeting, where the tasks for the sprint are identified and an estimated commitment for the sprint goal is made, and followed by a review or retrospective meeting, where the progress is reviewed and lessons for the next sprint are identified.
During each sprint, the team creates finished portions of a product. The set of features that go into a sprint come from the product backlog, which is an ordered list of requirements. Which backlog items go into the sprint (the sprint goals) is determined during the sprint planning meeting. During this meeting, the Product Owner informs the team of the items in the product backlog that he or she wants completed (the ones with the highest priority). The team then determines how much of this they can commit to complete during the next sprint, and records this in the sprint backlog. The sprint backlog is property of the development team, i.e. during a sprint, no one is allowed to edit the sprint backlog except for the development team. The sprint goals should not be changed during the sprint. Development is timeboxed such that the sprint must end on time; if requirements are not completed for any reason they are left out and returned to the product backlog. After a sprint is completed, the team demonstrates how to use the software.
Scrum enables the creation of self-organizing teams by encouraging co-location of all team members, and verbal communication between all team members and disciplines in the project.
A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team's ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.
Like other agile development methodologies, Scrum can be implemented through a wide range of tools. Many companies use universal tools, such as spreadsheets to build and maintain artifacts such as the sprint backlog. There are also open-source and proprietary packages dedicated to management of products under the Scrum process. Other organizations implement Scrum without the use of any tools, and maintain their artifacts in hard-copy forms such as paper, whiteboards, and sticky notes.
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