Yet another Scrum DIY

Talk is cheap and walking the talk is always a challenge. Most people can understand that its in human nature not to want to stick to a work plan. We can hardly maintain a schedule or keep time. There are also myriads of wrong things that can happen and derail our plan. This is unproductive for most projects with deadline. For a long time that I have been developing software projects, deadlines were a nightmare. The waterfall methodology is quite unproductive coupled with late substandard delivery, which makes clients unhappy. Me and my client not satisfied with the results and this often led to a gloomy feeling like I was an underachiever. The last days to deadline were always hectic and tiresome due to hours spent burning midnight oil to make sure I delivered within time. The lack of sleep and abnormal sleeping patterns really worn me out. This was before I began using agile methods and I had not discovered scrum.

Making Scrum as Swiss Army Knife for personal projects

Scrum is awesome agile framework that is intended for teams. It is a Swiss army knife for project managers, process hackers, achievers who intend to beat the clock and still have time to plan ahead. It is also flexible enough to be adopted by individuals. In fact you can manage any kind of work that yield results within specified finite time using Agile Scrum framework. Scrum feels natural way to break down big problems that cannot fully be planned ahead. In real world, requirements may not be fully known at the start of the project but scrum allows requirements discovery after each sprint cycle. The rewarding aspect of Scrum is short term sprints that produces a tangible result that can be deployed to the end user. This always provides a good feedback from end users and allow the developer to plan ahead. The sole best aspect I love about Scrum is the ability to improve on each sprint to rectify or resolve challenges cropping up. This makes scrum framework best agile way to increase personal productivity while also delivering within time.

Procedure

The main idea is to apply core principles of Scrum to manage our project. This is the meat that you want to chop, slice cook, and serve. Don’t worry much how it will be served but the least you can first make sure you will manage to chop. We shall undertake a sample manual work of slaughtering chicken and delivering to KFC. You will discover the principles in each stage of our project. Most project fit exactly all of them but some may be performed together.

• Make Time and Road Map (Set Calendar Schedule, Release goals in each stage)
• Gather minimum requirements(explore requirements)
• Backlog (Identify and Refine)
• Sprint (Work continuously towards goal while gathering empirical evidence. Your definition of done should be specific and clear enough to make it very easy to inspect)
• Reflect (Review, inspect, whats working and whats not)
• Version Control (Diary)
• Feedback (adapt, plan(cut non working and save time) changes, consider pivoting, night hours then sleep)
• Repeat

Sleep tight and happy

Even though sometimes I feel the need to overclock myself and extend working time until late into the night, it is counterproductive. Most developers are night owls and prefer to work in the quiet of the night but I feel the need to obey nature clock to sleep at night. That’s why I decided to adopt and adapt the Scrum framework in almost all of my personal projects. Since then it has been satisfactorily a bliss. I have some visible accomplishments, I am happy, I also have extra free time, and most importantly i have learned how to improve on my failures.