Since the design philosophy of ZenTao is based on Scrum,  it will make you learn and use ZenTao better to understand the basic concept of Scrum.

1. Agile

Waterfall is the well-known method of software project management, of which the basic process is storiy -> development -> test. It is assumed that the final result will be right, if each section is correct. There are very successful cases with Waterfall, like Microsoft. But, in general, it has a relatively high failure rate.Software pioneers have made a series of exploration, consideration and summary about the problems found in the Waterfall development and finally put up the concept of Agile. There are various Agile development, among which scrum is a relatively more popular one.

2. Scrum

2.1 Roles in Scrum

Scrum is consisted of Product Owner, Scrum master and Development team. 

• Product Owner is responsible for collecting user stories, defining their commercial values, ranking them and making release planning. They take full responsibility for the product.
• Scrum masters take charge of convening various meetings, coordinating projects and serving the Development team.
• Development team is a group of people with different skills. They complete each sprint and deliver products through close cooperation.

2.2 Sprint

Being different from the waterfall development, the product development in Scrum is decomposed into a number of sprints which life is between 1 week to 4 weeks. The number of team members is generally 5 to 9. The user story is fixed in each sprint. Each sprint will generate a certain delivery.

2.3 Basic process of Scrum

The basic process of scrum are shown as above.

• Product owners collect user stories and create the product backlog as shown at the left of the image above..
• Release Planning Meeting: product owners explain user stories, estimate and rank them. The output of release plan meeting is to make the story list of each sprint, forming sprint backlog.
• Sprint Planning Meeting: project teams decompose the tasks for each story. The decomposition standard is that all the tasks must be finished and each task is assigned to a specific person with an initial estimation of man hours.
• Daily Scrum Meeting: Scrum masters convene stand-up meeting every day, and the team members report what they did yesterday and what they will do today, and what their problems are.
• Presentation Meeting: when a sprint is over, all members involved will come together to have a presentation meeting. The team will show the result of the sprint.  All the feedbacks should be recorded and compiled to create new stories.  
• Review Meeting: project teams summarize the sprint, identify the deficiency and make plans in next sprint for continuous improvement. 

This is the basic process of Scrum and we will continue to elaborate it further in relevant chapters.