I rarely talk about work here…. If I do, I usually just complain. But for once, I want to talk about scrum and the fact it’s pretty cool.

Scrum is actually a rugby term. According to Merriam-Webster, it means "the forwards of each side come together in a tight formation and struggle to gain possession of the ball when it is tossed in among them".

Scrum focus on team work, yet each person is tasked to tackle their own road block. In software development (or internet development sense), it means knowing exactly and honestly how many hours you’re going to work on a project (in our case, a day is a 6 hr block).

By giving an accurate estimate before the project starts, you plan for your next 30 days. With scrum, you will know exactly who’s working on what, who’s behind, who need help, and who got nothing to do.

I have heard designers complain about scrum. Designers don’t like scrum because they feel like they are being dropped into the "middle" of a process – while the process is usually short and rapid.

For the designers that are used to the "Design Process", scrum might appear to "leave no time for design or inspiration". Our team deal with it this way:

While our current scrum is about what I am going to do in the next 30 days. The design artifacts I produced in those 30 days will be become a new engineer task for their next 30 days. That means, designer can still participate in scrum as an on going effort and engineer won’t sit around with nothing to do.

The whole thing is still pretty new to me. There are still projects coming to me in the waterfall approach and not in a scrum format, so going back and forth between the 2 does seems weird at time. But so far so good in regarding my scrum world.