General

In the past, software products was planned, developed and tested for years until the product was finally released to customers. During the long planning and implementation phases many things can change from the used technology to the customer needs. Due to the changes or problems that need to be handled in later phases, companies lost a lot of money because of the slow and wrong project management approaches.

However, things have changed since the year 2001, when the agile manifesto was introduced to revolutionize software development. The agile manifesto contains 12 principles with a clear focus on the customer, the software delivery, the collaboration inside a team and the outcome rather than processes and documentation.

Now, 18 years later since the agile manifesto was introduced by a group of software developers more than 70% (according to PMI) of all organizations use agile methodologies such as SCRUM and KANBAN.

In this article I want to focus on the agile methodology of SCRUM and why SCRUM matters for you and your company.

With the launch of modern smartphones in 2007 and one year later with mobile app stores, software products are used by their customers from every possible location. Furthermore, the products must serve the users’ needs wherever they are and whenever they want to use it. With the rise of high quality mobile phones and products the expectation from the software increased. Users are way more emotionally attached to their mobile phones and to the software that runs on it.

But what has this example to do with SCRUM?

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