# Agile and Scrum

> Building software in short cycles, showing results often and adjusting as you learn.

- Level: Basic
- Topics: Software
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/agile-and-scrum/
- In Spanish: [Agile y Scrum](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/agile-and-scrum/)

**Agile** is a family of ways to organize software work around short cycles and constant feedback, instead of one big plan carried out over a year. It was named in 2001 by a group of developers who wrote the **Agile Manifesto**, which values working software, collaboration with the customer and responding to change over heavy documentation and rigid contracts. The older style it reacted against is often called **waterfall**: specify everything, then build everything, then test everything, then deliver.

**Scrum** is the most widely used way of putting Agile into practice. Work is done in **sprints**, fixed periods of up to a month, very often two weeks. All pending work lives in a prioritized list called the **product backlog**. At the start of a sprint the team picks what it can finish; every day it holds a short meeting, the **daily scrum** or stand-up; at the end it shows what it built in a **sprint review** and discusses how to work better in a **retrospective**.

Scrum defines three roles: the **product owner**, who decides what matters most; the **Scrum Master**, who helps the team follow the process and removes obstacles; and the developers, who do the work. **Kanban** is a lighter alternative without sprints: tasks move across a board from "to do" to "done", with a limit on how many can be in progress at once. In practice many teams mix both, and "agile" sometimes ends up meaning just "lots of meetings", which misses the point.

## An analogy

Like driving with a GPS that recalculates, instead of printing the whole route before leaving. You still know where you are going, but every few kilometers you check where you actually are and adjust.

## Keep in mind

- Agile is a set of values; Scrum is one concrete way to apply them.
- Scrum works in sprints of up to a month, often two weeks.
- Each sprint should end with something working that people can see and use.
- Kanban drops sprints and limits how much work is in progress.

## Go deeper

- [Manifesto for Agile Software Development](https://agilemanifesto.org/)
- [The Scrum Guide](https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html)
- [Scrum on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(software_development))