Small Scale Scrum Framework

Due to its strong statistical position, developers liking, high success rates in both Scrum adoption and project deliveries, strong principles and values behind Scrum including focus, courage, openness, commitment and respect, Scrum is considered as a leading candidate for the implementation of Small Scale Agile.

Small Scale Scrum can be best described as “a people first framework defined by and for small (a maximum of 3 people) teams and supporting planning, developing and delivering production quality software solutions”. Proposed framework centers around the concept of team members occupying additional roles in any given project.

Small Scale Scrum is important due to its strong support for small scale, distributed teams seen in organizations all over the world. With the growth of customers rapid delivery and high quality expectations, small teams need to find new ways on how to meet continuously growing expectations. Small Scale Scrum is a set of guidelines and principles to help address the challenge.

Agnieszka, Gancarczyk, Small Scale Scrum Framework, 2018

Project Backlog is a list of everything that is known to be required in the project. Project backlog is created before commencement of any development work and maintained by Development Team. Project Backlog contains development tasks and requirements for software. This replaces the traditional Product and Sprint backlogs.

Sprint Planning meeting is timeboxed and focused on planning work for the upcoming Sprint. Development Team runs and is participating in Sprint Planning. It’s recommended that the team does some level of preparation work before Sprint Planning in order to keep the planning concise. Sprint Planning is value based. At this point requirements planned to be worked on in the upcoming Sprint should be clear and contain approved acceptance criteria. Capacity, typically measured as velocity, is not used, instead the team has to take an educated guess. Velocity only emerges after 3+ Sprints and often the Small Scale Scrum projects are over at that stage.

3 People Team is Development Team and Project Manager (most of the time). Development Team is expected to be involved in gathering and clarifying business requirements, development work, quality testing, releasing software to the customer.

POC/Demo is a realization of small work completed in the Sprint with the aim of showcasing progress made in development. Small deviation in work not fully completed are discussed during demonstration.

Sprint Review meeting is organized and run by Development Team and Project Manager (if involved in the project) and attended by customer or customer team. Sprint Review is timeboxed and contains demonstration of Sprint work with a short outline of work completed/not completed, bugs raised, known and/or descoped issues (if any). At the end of demonstration, customer is asked for feedback. Feedback notes are taken and incorporated into future Sprints. There is very little preparation required before the meeting, if any, to keep it short and structured.

Sprint Retrospective meeting is organized and run by Development Team and Project Manager (if involved in the project) and attended by customer and/or customer team. Sprint Retrospective is timeboxed and does not require prior preparation. Due to the small size of Development Team and small Sprint builds (with smaller number of features delivered) meeting is relatively short. The Sprint Retrospective takes place after the Sprint Review and prior to the new Sprint Planning.

Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective and Sprint Planning can be combined and happen as a single meeting. On average, all three meetings combined are 1.5 hr long. They are concise, structured (thanks to preparation beforehand) and without any unnecessary/unrelated discussions.

First/Final Release is the end result of the project. Development Team runs the tests, verifies completed work, confirms fixes and signs off the release build.

The Scrum guide timebox guidelines are followed for Small Scale Scrum ceremonies.


Next: Small Scale Scrum Principles

From “Small Scale Scrum: A Framework for Successful Implementation of the Scrum Methodology for Small Sized Teams” by Agnieszka Gancarczyk and under the supervision of Dr Leigh Griffin.

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