alex blabs

hmm. what's the biggest difference between scrum and xp then?

The moustaches. XP's are cooler.

Serious answer: Scrum is like what you'd get if you took XP, subtracted all the practices having to do with how you actually write code (pairing, testing, refactoring, etc.) and how you estimate stories (no story points, no story/task distinction), replaced XP's insistence on a linear priority order for stories with a binary "in or out" attribute, and stretched out the iteration length to a month (although some Scrum teams I've seen use 2 week sprints).

Of course the reality is a bit more complicated than that, since they have separate genealogies and jargon and stuff. Hopefully what I've written above won't strike any scrummeisters as slanderous.

Scrum works very well if you want to introduce Agile into an organization since it's less of a horse pill to swallow than XP, and since it focuses on project management and iterations rather than covering everything from how you compose stories to how often you check in code like XP does.

We've seen success in some places by introducing Scrum first to get people used to iterations and story definition and just shipping code every month, then adding XP underneath Scrum, with some smoothing out the edges where the two methodologies overlap. And make sure to add a few other Agile practices that are mentioned but not enforced by either XP or Scrum, like Retrospectives. and Domain-Driven Design.