Monthly Archives: August 2015

Scrum with a Small Team and Multiple Projects

At my company, Scrum was adopted as our Agile development framework, and our team began working on the maintenance of six projects with different technologies.

Our Scrum team has these roles:

  • 4 Java developers
  • 1 Product owner
  • 1 QA analyst

OK, but how could we work on all our various projects and still take advantage of the benefits of Scrum?

It was not possible to create a team for each project, nor even to stop working on any of the projects. So we’ve started developing our sprint backlog via these steps:

  1. Predict how many real shifts we will have during the sprint.
  2. Estimate the priority items from among the six product backlogs, using Planning Poker.
  3. Set the percentage of importance that each project will have in the sprint.
  4. Move those items to the sprint backlog.

Sprint Backlog

In the last three years, we have had success with this approach. Have you faced a similar case? Please be sure to comment and share your experiences.

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