One or Two Agile

Very well, We all talk about Agile and the Scrum. Basically we talked about scrum a lot. So in this article I’m not going to explain about agile software development, I'm going to introduce a new software development process to follow when we have a small team. One or two members (Obviously, we can have scrum if we have 3 or more people in the team).

The problems with the Small team when we following Scrum?

The ceremonies of Scrum are going to put way more overhead on the team than is worth the value that they deliver. Basically in my opinion Scrum’s “sweet spot” is 7 +/- 2, or between 5 and 9 team members. If teams are too small they just don’t get the value for the time. If teams are too big, the ceremonies take too long and waste the time of whomever not actively participating in the moment.

So what are the options,

One of the good suggestion is to follow the XP (Extreme Programming) process with paired programming and Test-Driven Development.

Then, I came up with the the process using Scrum and XP called One or Two Agile.

Inheritance from the Scrum

• Estimations and Techniques
• Sprint planning.
• Sprint Review.
• Sprint Retrospective.
• Scrum Master (Obviously yes)
• Product Owner (You have two yeses)

Inheritance from the XP

• Iterations (Weekly cycles)
• Releases (Quarterly Cycles)

The Changes

• Daily scrum is replaced by a special event called Story Telling. Scrum Master and the Development team will have a Timebox of five minutes talk at the start of the day About the work planned to carry out in that particular day.
• Tech Followups — There might be a multiple number of Technical Followup meetings to overcome the technical issues and to make sure that the Development team follow the correct Technical Architecture. There can be a Lead or a architect involve in the process and meetings should be one on one.
• Cross functional — One person many roles (Not too much, just testing and development). this is not a might. This is a should.

The Roles

• Dev-Tester(Cross functional) — 2
• Scrum Master — The Coach
• Product Owner /The Customer— The Tracker

The Technical Process

• Stories — Same old same story, Scrum! you are not gonna miss here!
• Git Flow Model with the PR(Pull Request to review the code) Iteration/Functional Release to the development branch (Yes for the QA) quarterly release to the master branch (When release).
• CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Development)
• Ten minutes Releases — Releases can not take more than ten minutes. If people waste time to watch releases, you know, it a waste of time.
• Pair Programming if required, with the lead. (Dear Scrum Master, don’t ask lead to check the code and get back. reserve his/her time to check the code with the developer)
• TDD — Test Driven Development
• Incremental Design — Don’t start with too complex designs. Leads! Simplicity is the Ultimate sophistication. (Dear Scrum, Still you are not missed) Think simple and leave it to be complex.

This article may not be a interesting if you don’t know the concepts of the Scrum and the XP. Try it and share the experience with me. Then we can fine tune the process to help the others to deliver good quality product using the small team with full transparency to the client.

Cheers.