What is Scrum?
Scrum is the most widely used agile framework: small cross-functional teams deliver working product in fixed-length sprints (≤ 1 month, commonly 2 weeks). Three roles — product owner, scrum master, developers; five events — the sprint itself, sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, retrospective; three artifacts — product backlog, sprint backlog, increment.
Its engine is empiricism: transparency, inspection, adaptation. Scrum doesn't promise you'll be right — it guarantees you'll find out fast.
Worked example
An insurance-claims team works in two-week sprints. Each sprint ends with a review where real adjusters click through the working increment — and in sprint 6 they reveal the fraud-flag workflow everyone loved on paper is unusable in practice. Cost of the discovery: two weeks. The old annual-release process priced the same lesson at fourteen months.