Some days ago I joined a session on scrum. The speaker of the session was the assistant director of our department and also a certified scrum master. The session was very good. The speaker was not trying to teach us everything about scrum in a couple of hours time. But he was trying to help us to change our mindset towards agile and scrum. It was not a theoretical session but an interactive one. I am giving below some of the key takeaways from the session.

• Scrum is one of the method (probably the most simple one) to follow agile. There are other methods of agile out there as well.
• The length of a scrum team usually should be between 5 to 9 people.
• There are scrum master, product owner, developers and testers in a scrum team.
• Product owner creates a collection of requirements called product backlog where everything saved as stories which needs to be done for the product be successful.
• Sprint is a fixed time duration (usually 2 to 4 weeks) where team develop and test some specific stories of the product.
• At the start of every sprint there is a session called sprint planning happens where sprint goal has been decided and based on that sprint backlog has been created from product backlog.
• Every day a session take place which is called daily scrum. On it every one specify three things. What he did yesterday, what he will do today and any blockers. It should take only 15 minutes and not more than that. Discussing things in detail is a bad practice in this session.
• At the end of every sprint there is sprint review session where team used to give demo of their work of that sprint to customers.
• Also at the end of every sprint there is a session called sprint retrospective where team discuss what went good and bad in the sprint.
• Scrum team should be mature enough to take requirements so that sprint goal can be mate. There is no leader in the team. Everyone is equal.
• Once a story has been placed in a sprint there will be no change in that. Any required change needs to go product backlog for future sprints. Once sprint starts no one should change the sprint goal and add more stories in it.
• The advantage of agile is quicker delivery of small features to production. It will help quicker revenue. Product owner can change requirements based on changing market more easily.