ScrumUP Fairytale - Part 1

The Soup Stone – 1: At the beginning…


Once upon a time in a land far far away a soldier served in the king's army, or the emperor's or sultan's. History is not really clear on that point. In this land a conflict had been going on for many years, that cost a lot of people their lives and made even more people miserable. Our soldier played a very important role in finding a peaceful solution to this conflict which is quite an accomplishment since this hadn't been part of his training as a soldier. But that's another story and should be told another time.

At the beginning of our story a peace treaty is signed which brings an end to a lot of suffering. The citizens return to their normal lives and our soldier's service ends. So he starts on the long journey home. It is a journey that will take him to a lot of places he has never been before. He crosses inhabitable deserts, harsh mountains, wild rivers, dark forests and strange cities.

One fine sunny day he is crossing a great plane. While he is walking he encounters more and more signs of civilization, he sees houses, pieces of farmland and people too.

Introduction
This blog has drawn your attention. This could mean that you have an interest in Scrum and RUP. You could be intrigued by the combination of the two and wonder how on earth RUP with its extensive software development process can be combined with a lightweight management approach for Agile IT-development like Scrum. You could have experience with Agile methods and be looking for ways to improve your way of working. You could even just be looking for ways to start with Agile. In all those cases read on for these are all things we are going to cover.

If some of the terms used above do not ring a bell, don’t worry. In the next weeks we will give a short introduction of iterative development with RUP and Agile methods like Scrum and XP. For now just know that they are different ways of looking at performing, managing and improving on IT-development. In spite of their differences in size, formality and scope the common goal is improving the way we build and configure software. That is also what this book is about, providing a toolkit that you can use to improve your software development efforts and to assess their effectiveness.