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Scrum: Facing a temporal reduction of team size to just 1 developer + PO

Last post 12:43 am June 18, 2020 by Mark Adams
6 replies
06:57 am June 16, 2020

"That's not scrum, minimum team size is 2- 3 people!"

I know, but that's the situation I need to face, first of all sorry if topic has been treated before here, but i couldn't really find anything regarding this specific question

"What if suddenly my team is reduced to the minimum expression? What are the alternatives to Scrum i have to maintain inspection, adaptation, and value focus?"

Situation, we were a Scrum team, smaill, 3 developers + PO, working pretty much smoothly, 30 sprints together, in 2 week cadences,  reaching a regular velocity, and finally becoming a mature and self organized team, with its ups and downs but working effectively. 

Problem, in 3 months, up to date, one person left the company, and other had to take a leave because health reasons for three months, my company cannot provide in short term people to cover the people leaving, so It will be one dev and one PO (myself)  for at least 2 - 3 months.

Solution Here's where I would like to start discussion, I hope it works ; ). My gut feeling is to switch, until we are back to at least 2 developers in team, to kanban with monthly "reviews", backlog inspection with stakehoders mainly, and showcase of working software, doing monthly retrospectives as well. But i'm wondering, given that this would be a temporal situation, if simply extending our sprint length to one month, even being a "perverted" scrum as we are just 2 people on team, would be simply enough to ensure we deliver value periodically, and keeping inspection and adaptation routines, which really helped team to focus on what is really important, and gain knowledge to be self organized. 

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

Cheers

.


03:36 pm June 16, 2020

If you only have 2 people, why can't you just adapt to continuous inspection and adaption? If as you say the team has been successful with the Scrum Framework, you should already be appreciative and have understanding of the inspect/adapt structure of work.  Continue to communicate, continue to refine, continue to reflect, continue to adapt, continue to collaborate.  If you want to continue to plan 2 week cadences or go to a pull system from a list of items that need to be done, then do it.  

The agility of a team does not have to be done in accordance with a specific framework or methodology. If your 2 man team can be agile in other ways, then do so.  


04:13 pm June 16, 2020

There's you and one other person. To maintain empirical process control, do the two of you need a process framework at all? If so, why?


03:42 pm June 17, 2020

Thanks for your answers both

The final conclussion I reached, is a mixture between your two answers, what we decided to do is adapt current process to the small team we are now, so we keep inspection and adaption, and focus on a goal in short term,  but simplyfing it a bit, to not add overhead, being just 2 people working on same room and state. This means:

.- Longer sprints 4 weeks

.- No Dailies, but daily 10 minutes sync, not mandatory but should happen at least a couple of times a week as we will talk continously

.- No big plannings, we define a goal for next sprint right after review, and we will pull the already refined stories

.- Keep refining every 2 weeks, we will use the event to review and adjust goal if neccesary

.- No retrospective, we will speak daily and we have good levels of trust to address any issue as it happens

 

Let's see how it works, I will share insights and conclusions here for further discussion

Cheers

 


06:18 pm June 17, 2020

If you are willing to sacrifice Scrum events, structure and timeboxes, why stick to a Framework? Why stick to Scrum?


06:26 pm June 17, 2020

Good question,

Initially, and more as this will be a temporal situation, I was thinking on forgetting about scrum for these months and come back when team again is rebuilt

But I do not want to lose the reviews, as are a very important information gathering event, and with lots of conversations happening.  Neither certain refining and iterative value delivery.

So I will try this, anyway this thread was opened to get your feedback guys, this is not a usual situation and little has been discussed about how to face radical team size reductions

 

Thank you!


12:43 am June 18, 2020

Not long ago, I worked on a 3.5 person Scrum Team. We didn't increase the Sprint duration. We reduced it to one week. I convinced the leader of the tech vertical to give my team the freedom to get things done. And we were so efficient, that we were pushing out two product increments per week. However, we were an exception because we were truly cross-functional and did not have dependencies on security, data warehouse, compliance, architecture, etc. 


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