Explaining scrum as a baseball game

Scrum is the most suitable process model when developing a product. This blog post will illustrate the different roles with metaphors from a baseball game.

Baseball - Bailey Park
Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/battlecreekcvb/

We at Incentergy believe in listening to our customers and continuously delivering what they request. We are learning every day and we want all our users to participate.

During our work we often have to explain complex things in an easy way. In this blog post we are explaining different characteristics of the scrum process.

Players = Developers

This is the most basic metaphor. All the participating team members can be seen as players for one team. They have to work together in a strategic way to achieve most points. Every player should do what the coach tells him. Further they have to be well trained and the better all the players are the better the team will perform.

Good communication and friendship helps the team to perform best and to help each other out if something breaks.

Coach = Scrum Master

The scrum master can be seen as coach. He is the person that has to care that everybody works together and he has to make the strategic decisions. He must be an educated and wise man or woman. Besides technical decision he also has to help when there are social conflicts. He has to know the rules and all the tips and tricks. People will ask him for advice.

Run = Stories

Every player has to do as many runs as possible in an inning. With his run he might help other player to finish their run. He should observe the field well to know what is currently going on and play his run in the best way.

Base = Story state

Every story has to transit through different states:

  • Specified
  • In process
  • To verify
  • Done

Sometimes it is possible to skip some states. Sometimes it might even make sense to skip a whole story or import it from somewhere else. We can call this: “Home Run!”. You should have as many home runs as possible.

Inning = Sprint

A sprint can be seen as an inning. There is a plan how to handle the inning and it is not exactly known how many inning are necessary to win the game. An inning has a defined flow and when 3 players are out it is over.

Fans = Customer

Our customers want to see as many runs as possible. They don’t tell us how to win but they will love us if we do. They will complain if something is wrong and everybody will have a different opinion about the current game.

If you want to become a fan of our platform please get in touch with us.

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