Scrum of One: How to Bring Scrum Into Your One-Person Operation

Keeping Organized: The Task Board

Time to step away from the sprint for a moment and talk about the Task Board. Although I type up my Sprint Plan in some detail (usually in OneNote), my day-to-day task organization occurs on this infamous Task Board. The board (usually my office wall) can have a few different elements, but the most important part starts with these three post-its, placed a foot or two apart: TODO, DOING, and DONE.

At the end of each day, I write down the next day’s tasks on separate post-it notes and then stick them up under TODO. Let’s say I’ve gotten through 10 daily Task Points on average over the past couple sprints or so. I’d then put up about 10 points of tasks for the next day.

The next morning, I walk over to the Task Board and move my first task of the day from TODO to DOING. When most of the day is normally spent in front of a computer, this simple act feels especially intentional which I find really helps with focus.

Then, when the task is done, I move the post-it to DONE. Oddly satisfying. As the sprint progresses, the DONE section really fills up. :]

Rest and Explore

Back to the sprint. You’re now getting into the final Friday afternoon of the sprint. End the day with something fun! This is the time I bring my laptop to the couch and pull up that raywenderlich.com tutorial I’ve had bookmarked for a few days, or maybe this is when I finally take the time to figure out the ins and outs of Regex.

Don’t pick something that feels like a chore; just do something loosely related to work that you enjoy. Pour yourself a drink, turn on some music, and celebrate a sprint well done!

One-Person Scrum vs. The Real World

Choosing the right work structure as an indie developer is a very personal thing. It needs to resonate with your strengths, motivate you, and encourage constant growth. With that in mind, you may find that certain elements of my one-person variant of Scrum work for you, while others don’t. Feel free to adapt the daily practices to suit your needs and style — do whatever works to keep those principles of shipping, quantified productivity, and reflection/iteration in place.

A few parting tips:

• Don’t feel bad if you get through fewer tasks than you’d planned in your initial sprints. Just adjust your estimates and task load for the next sprint. Meaningful iteration is the name of the game!
• Revise your Sprint Plan every day (or two) of the sprint. Review each task and tweak the Task Points (“you know what, this actually looks like more of a three-point task”). If your total count starts getting too high, you’ll want to remove some lower priority tasks to compensate.
• It’s hard to plan detail from a distance. If you’re using two week sprints, it’s OK if your task plans for the second week are a little less detailed. Your daily tweaks to the Sprint Plan will fill out that detail as the second week approaches.
• It’s great to have long term plans for your company, but don’t stick to them blindly. It’s better to have a great Product Backlog that’s alive, always changing, and always adapting to new evidence.
• Although this is the plan I use for building Ten Kettles’ apps, I’ve found that it’s also great for client work with just a couple minor variations. For example, a shared Trello board instead of a physical Task Board can keep the clients up to speed on what you’re working on, although I tend to use a Task Board as well, and there’s obviously no need for the “CEO-hat” stuff (Product Backlog, Story Time, etc.)
• Don’t forget to buy lots of markers and a big stack of post-its!

When I first realized that I needed a better work structure as an indie, it came down to three things: more productivity, more income from my own apps, and more happiness. I’m happy to report that this one-person version of Scrum has really delivered: the frequency of meaningful app updates at Ten Kettles has skyrocketed, income from our apps is now increasing at an average of 18% a month, users are very happy (both apps are now rated at 4.75 stars on the App Store), and my work-life balance has gotten way better — hello evenings and weekends!

Where to Go From Here?

Here’s a recent interview where I get into more detail about my work at Ten Kettles and my daily workflow.

Remember that the three core principles of Scrum are:

• Regular shipping
• Prioritizing productivity
• Regular reflection

It looks simple, but with a good structure, the power of these principles can start to manifest in your work.

If you want to learn more about Scrum (especially the team elements that we didn’t cover here), there are loads of great resources out there.

Here are a couple of short books to get you started:

• Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time (Sutherland, Sutherland)
• Scrum: a Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction (Sims, Johnson)

Time pass the microphone to you! Have you been doing your own one-person Scrum? Do you have any tips to share? Or, if you’re an expert “Scrummer” and have some advice to help the rest of us really reap the rewards (and avoid the common pitfalls) of Scrum, it’d be great to hear your take too. Come join the discussion below!