By Mathew Schwartz

Software developers, behold the Scrum.

Not a rugby aficionado? The term means the mass of interlocked players - tough lads, fearless lasses - facing off against their opponents when play restarts, each trying to kick the ball back to their side for possession. Think order out of chaos. Some bleeding may result.

Minus the cuts and bruises, the Scrum development methodology is similar. Scrum calls for a single, cross-functional group, ideally with 10 people - including business stakeholders, multitalented tech folks and a ScrumMaster playing project coordinator - all located in close physical proximity. Together they focus not on tools or technologies, per se, but business results.

To do that, Scrum employs sprints - originally four  weeks long, now typically two weeks in duration. Each sprint is a plan to deliver fully working, tested and implemented code. For every sprint, the team together decides which capability has top priority, creates a plan, delivers, then reviews what it's done.

Time to Sprint

Benefits to this "controlled burst" approach include delivering more relevant software, lowering business risk and creating more satisfied coders. "Every two weeks we get the chance to improve what we're doing, and we can do it with the customer," says Alan Atlas, a certified ScrumMaster trainer and agile development coach with Rally Software in Boulder, Colo. "No longer do we have to spend two years to see if something we build will work."

Hierarchy? Stuff it. Scrum teams self-organize. Waterfall approach? Don't bother. What if the customer requests change? Of course they will, so build in a mechanism for change requests and reassessing priorities.

What if the business request doesn't work? "We're very quickly able to tell the business whether it's viable or not, or whether it's something they need to rethink," says Adam Monago, VP of client service for ThoughtWorks Studios in Chicago. In other words, the two-week Scrum sprint was still time well spent.

The Scrum Rush

Scrum isn't news to many businesses. Indeed, according to a 2009 survey conducted by Tom Grant, senior analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., roughly one in three software development teams used at least some kind of agile development - an umbrella term that includes Scrum, Crystal Clear and Extreme Programming (XP), Crystal Clear, lean and now kanban.

"Though Scrum is clearly, by far, the most commonly adopted," says Grant, "it's important to stress that what teams are doing is a mixing and matching exercise."

Why mix and match? One reason is to augment Scrum with software engineering best practices. For that, Monago at ThoughtWorks Studios says many organizations also embrace XP, which emphasizes test-driven development ("only write the code you need"), continuous integration (build and link code regularly to prevent costly errors) and refactoring ("constantly tweak the code and make it prettier").

Developers Play Ball

If you build Scrum teams, will developers sign on? "Done well, Scrum seems to speak to a large portion of the high-tech development community," says Rally's Atlas. Points in its favor include empowering teams, letting people see their direct impact on a project, keeping people cross-skilled and thus marketable, and reducing paperwork to a minimum.

But Scrum does have pitfalls. "Lots of organizations leave a lot of money on the table by not going all the way," says Atlas. "There's a great deal of difficulty and discipline involved to get past 50 years of organizational memory about how we're supposed to do projects." Indeed, everything from management and support to HR systems and compensation require rethinking.

Get Scrum Savvy

When it comes to mastering Scrum, either as individuals or organizations, experts recommend studying the fundamentals, but also bringing a coach onsite for the first few months to help put Scrum theory into practice, starting with one team. Pick an important - but not the most important - project. Do it well, start to turn heads, then expand the Scrum rollout.

Remember that Scrum isn't dogma, but a lightweight, flexible mindset and framework focused not on tools and technologies, but business results and short project phases planned and executed in two-week bursts. In other words, practice Scrum well, and what looked at first like chaos turns out to imbue software development speed, flexibility and control.

Mathew Schwartz is a technology writer based in Pennsylvania.