The four values of Scrum as per the Scrum Guide are:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Valuing people more than the processes and tools is the main aim of Scrum. Communication is an example of valuing individuals versus process. It is the people who respond to business NEEDS and drive the development process. Daily Scrum meeting and Retrospection is an example of this where each individual will get to interact with the team and leaders directly.

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

Historically, an enormous amount of time is spent on documentation and was one of the biggest causes of DELAYS in product development and delivery which INDIRECTLY leads to customer dissatisfaction. It is a myth that Scrum doesn’t support documentation rather it streamlined the process in such a way which gives the developer an opportunity to work on what is needed and deliver the best quality software which leads to customer satisfaction. Agile documents REQUIREMENTS as user stories, which are sufficient for a software developer to begin the task of building a new function.

The Agile Manifesto values documentation, but it values working software more.

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

In the Scrum process, the customer has involved even before the project starts (Iteration planning), during the project execution which is sprint review. With this customer collaboration during the entire process, the development phase is quite easy and expected to meet the customer needs. With development models such as Waterfall, customers negotiate the requirements for the product, often in great detail, prior to any work starting which means that requirements are completely frozen and no scope of changing them in between.

• Responding to change over FOLLOWING a plan

With short sprint cycles, the customer change in requirements can be incorporated easily in the next iteration whereas traditional methods the incorporation of changes in the middle is very expensive.

Agile’ s view is that changes always improve a project; changes provide additional value.