Agile methods also have differences to consider. The differences can be looked at across the following criteria:

•Size of development team. Considering the adoption of methods, the size of the development team is one of the main decisive issues.
◦XP and Scrum, for example, are focused on small teams (e.g. <10 people).
◦FDD and DSDM claim to be capable of scaling up to 100 developers. Note that with agile, when the development team gets larger so does the amount of documentation and communication and this tends to make the project less agile.

Scrum is an agile approach to software development. Rather than a full process or methodology, it is a framework. So instead of providing complete, detailed descriptions of how everything is to be done on the project, much is left up to the team. This is done because the team will know best how to solve its problem.

As a ScrumMaster, I was asked this question many times. Sometimes I had enough time to explain, sometimes not. But every time it was challenging to provide a clear picture of what a ScrumMaster really does.

To help myself and other ScrumMasters, I have started to write down general activities, which characterize the role of the ScrumMaster (see below).

The priority of activities varies by company.

1.Keeps Scrum process running
2.Ensures a proper power balance between PO, Team, Management
3.Protects the Team
4.Moderates in the Team
5.Helps to organize (e.g., Meetings)

In the late 1990’s several methodologies began to get increasing public attention. Each had a different combination of old ideas, new ideas, and transmuted old ideas. But they all emphasized close collaboration between the programmer team and business experts; face-to-face communication (as more efficient than written documentation); frequent delivery of new deployable business value; tight, self-organizing teams; and ways to craft the code and the team such that the inevitable requirements churn was not a crisis.

http://www.agilealliance.org/show/2

Jack Milunsky

I may have blogged about this previously. I have written so many blogs, I can't recall any more. However questions regarding Sprint length surface on the forums regularly.

As per usual, the answers one must give always depends on the context and every context is different than the next. So let me start with the context - this is an excerpt of a post on the scrum development group on Yahoo. Incidentally, Yahoo groups is a good place to hang out. You learn a lot from all the questions and the different contexts facing teams around the world.

The Context