How to handle single engineer development in Scrum
We are new to Scrum, and are just getting rolling with the scrum team doing some refining of product backlog items.
One problem is that there are a few engineers who work on separate pieces of the puzzle, such as power supplies for a new panel, and they work by themselves ... and have nothing common to the development team ... except that their finished product supplies power to the eventual panel that is being developed.
Anybody have suggestions or experience on how to handle this? I know I can't have a scrum team of one person. And they are not really part of the scrum team's product features. So do we exclude these loaners from scrum altogether?
Thanks
Perhaps it is me, but I am having difficulty understanding the problem.
Are these "few engineers" members of the Scrum team? Are they external to your Scrum team?
Who is on your Scrum team?
Who is your Product Owner? Is there a Product Backlog maintained by the Product Owner that your Scrum Team supports?
Hi Timothy,
We are just starting scrum, as stated, and trying to decide what to do with engineers who basically are on a development team from waterfall, but really develop on their own. Since the rules say you cannot have less than 3 members on a scrum team, what do you do in an Agile environment with single product developers? Have them continue waterfall? They don't really belong on the scrum team, they will not benefit from any of the meetings.
It is not a simple question, but one we need help with. What do others do in this case?
Think in terms of the people who are needed to create and deliver a product increment, each and every sprint. A Development Team should have all of the people and skills needed to create those increments as per the Definition of Done. Any dependencies on people or resources outside of the team may cause impediment and put the Sprint Goal at risk.
Are you delivering this product iteratively and incrementally to a Product Owner who values the corresponding releases? If so, then the Development Team must include all of those who perform the essential work.
Yes, we are a scrum team, I am a certified scrum master ... the question is not being addressed, so maybe I am not being specific enough.
If your organization has gone Agile, how do you run a single person scrum process, when scrum dictates a team has to have 3 persons or more? What do you do with those single person projects? The company is Agile, using scrum, but nowhere does it say how to address a project of less than 3 people. Do you default back to waterfall for them? Or, has somebody come up with another solution?
Thanks much for your help, everyone ...
As Scrum is built around cross-functional teams, it doesn't make sense to work in a single person Scrum team (even if Scrum rules would allow it). In such cases it could make more sense to have these developers work in Kanban, as it is oriented around service delivery and allows working with "personal Kanban".
choosing way of doing stuff: agile/scrum vs waterfall, should never be result of having too many or too much people. Agile and scrum especially is for complex problems. If your project is complex, you will probably gain better results if you apply iterative and incremental approach, transparently showing current state and planned activities to increase chances of hearing feedback.
Yeah, we just started to use in our startup scrum and still runing good
So... Building an in-house hardware development team can be a challenge - and not only because there are more jobs than skilled specialists on the market. Before hiring somebody for an engineering position or building an in-house dev team, you need to double-check a number of things. You can take as an example about outsourced engineer team like Axonim to avoid common hiring mistakes . Good luck with your business.