One of the major differences between Traditional Waterfall and Agile is that while in the Traditional Waterfall environment you plan the work in the beginning itself making assumptions wherever necessary while in Agile you avoid making assumptions and planning everything upfront.
Scrum teams take decisions based on real information as soon as its discovered. This is done by using the three pillars of scrum,
1. Transparency
Transparency is when the scrum team decides together what items to be included in the sprint and what it would take to do the same. All work done by each scrum team member is visible to the rest of the scrum team.
2. Inspect
In the daily scrum, the team inspects each item that’s being worked upon. Not necessarily the entire item but more of findings.
3. Adapt
If changes are discovered, the scrum team adapts to them. For instance, adding or removing items from the sprint backlog based on the real-time information and sprint schedule.
Note that Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation work cyclically i.e. transparency, inspection and adaptation is done throughout the sprint. This cycle continues everyday until the timebox expires and the sprint is complete. The team doesn’t inspect and adapt at just the daily scrum but also at other scrum events like sprint planning, sprint review and sprint retrospective.
Check more articles on Agile