SCRUM Meetings and Agile Methodology; an Intern's perspective!

         SCRUM meetings, three times a week. What's it like? Well imagine running a marathon (26.2 miles), and every 3 miles there was a checkpoint (sprint release) with water breaks every 5 minutes(the weekly SCRUM meetings). Now picture, for explanation purposes, that you had to reach each checkpoint in about 30 minutes. The first checkpoint (sprint 1) goes fine. Then later on, as you running along on your way to the next checkpoint (sprint 2) filled with confidence and optimism, your shoe becomes undone and you trip and slam hard on to the ground scraping your knee. By the time you get up, have assessed the damage and adapted to this new obstacle (a scraped knee) you've added like 5 minutes to your sprint. Put that into context of software development, you're a week or two behind on features that should've been released by the planned sprint/ release date and now the date has to be pushed back a week to adapt to and change some things in the project........But no worries, the next checkpoint(sprint) is coming up and you'll get a band-aid, some water and be ready to go! This is what it's like developing software with Agile methodology.

       This may seem annoying, but remember that a lot of what is a part of Agile methodology is a project team continuously setting expectations, trying to adhere to them and adapt to obstacles that occur. Fixing issues when running into them and not waiting until the end of a project to realize a feature set won't work out or that you don't meet the required security specifications. In Software development there is always road bumps. Agile methodology helps to minimize the blow back by continuously addressing the problems and staying on top of them as they occur instead of letting it worsen and allowing a potential bug to be an integral part of the project that compromises most of what has been done. 

        Ultimately SCRUM allows for increased adaptive capability to change, expecting these changes, and more control of the direction of development. As well as increased quality in each release.