This presentation was based on the written report authored by Leigh Griffith and Agnieszka Gancarczyk, Small Scale Scrum. Agnieszka spent a year researching Small Scale Scrum for her final thesis and has recently graduated with an MSc in Computing.
What if you have less than 3 people available on a project? What if you want to or need to use Scrum? In Agile, Scale is a hot topic, but how does scaling work in the opposite direction? How do you scale down a process like Scrum for teams of 1-2 people and still make it deliver value?
This is a scenario facing a lot of people who want to follow Scrum but don’t have a team around them. Take for example consultants working on per hour projects, where customer budget is finite and features over people are prioritised. College students working on final year projects or their thesis area which is a single person challenge. Open Source contributors building and maintaining projects that are powering the Fortune 500 are often 1-2 maintainers. These are some of the scenarios that we faced in Red Hat, all of which can follow an Agile way of work where Scrum’s principles and execution can be applied to small-scale teams; however, they’re often applied in a way that leads to something slipping. In our experience, that is quality. We set out to investigate whether we could maintain a high-level of quality and still have value driven output with a reduced team size. The result of this research is Small Scale Scrum, a long awaited and novel concept in Agile supporting planning, developing and delivering production quality software solutions for 1-2 person teams.
We will share the Small Scale Manifesto, the Small Scale Framework, results of our survey and share with you the successes of running this project in 10 real world projects and finally how we will crowdsource Version 2.0 of Small Scale Scrum by allowing you, the Agile community, to help us Inspect & Adapt the framework.
