At our company we have a team working on 3 different projects at the same time, where typically only one or two people are involved in each project. Project work often involves mastering new technologies and or solving bugs, both leading to tasks which are very hard to estimate. In this situation, the management still insists on using SCRUM and does not allow allocating a safety buffer at the end of the sprint for unexpected situations. The stand-up meeting happens for the whole team, although pretty much everyone works on unrelated software components or different software projects all together.
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I was wondering if someone have seen SCRUM working well for a project with a single developer and fuzzy tasks, and how you made the process work well?
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How to estimate tasks which involved research/mastering new technologies (this involves learning new programming languages, platforms, and development tools)?
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Has anyone succeeded in convincing management not to use SCRUM for particular projects, and if yes, which arguments were most successful?
Thanks!
Best Answer
Look up "Personal Scrum"... I've seen a couple or three blog posts of people doing this. Full Scrum has some notions that won't translate perfectly to single person teams. (My experience -- a certain "critical mass" of about 4 people seems to make team-stuff work well.)
https://jgpruitt.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/personal-scrum/ for example.
But things like task estimation, velocity, and time-bound sprints during which the task-list is "protected" work well even for 1.