SCRUM

Introduction
SCRUM is a loose set of guidelines that govern the development process of a product, from its design stages to its completion. It aims to cure some common failures of the typical development process, such as:

Chaos due to changing requirements - the real or perceived requirements of a project usually change drastically from the time the product is designed to when it is released. Under most product development methods, all design is done at the beginning of the project, and then no changes are allowed for or made when the requirements change.
Unrealistic estimates of time, cost, and quality of the product - the project management and the developers tend to underestimate how much time and resources a project will take, and how much functionality can be produced within those constraints. In actuality, this usually cannot be accurately predicted at the beginning of the development cycle.
Developers are forced to lie about how the project is progressing - When management underestimates the time and cost needed to reach a certain level of quality, the developers must either lie about how much progress has been made on the product, or face the indignation of the management.
SCRUM has been successfully employed by hundreds of different companies in many different fields, with outstanding results.

You will find many similarities between SCRUM and Extreme Programming, but one of the major differences is that SCRUM is a fairly general set of guidelines that govern the development process of a product. For this reason, it is often used as a "wrapper" for other methodologies, such as XP or CMM (Capability Maturity Model) - that is, it is used to guide the overall process of development when using these other methodologies





http://www.codeproject.com/gen/design/scrum.asp