We at Componence decided to use the agile project development methodology Scrum to develop a product that has little predefined requirements and a lot of technical challenges.

Scrum is quite a leap from our usual approach called PIM which is Prince 2 based and aimed at structured and controlled project development. Scrum has a highly agile character with scope and planning using yellow papers, daily stand up meetings and a lot of interaction between the developers, designers and project management.

The project team is located in one room on our office. This meant taking people from their usual places and getting them deep into the project ‘cave’. We’ve drawn up a lot of yellow papers with features on them and stuck them to the wall in a square called “Todo”, this represents the open workload and the upper line of yellow papers is the workload for the active sprint of 1 week. When a feature is being developed we move it to the next square called “In progress”, which has a subsection with features that will be finished today. Finally there is a square called “Done”, this shows all completed features.

Each morning at 9.00 sharp we discuss the previous day, the current day and the challenges we’ve had and still expect. This meeting is open for every member of the project, including our client.

The approach takes some getting used to. Especially since we’re used to working with a strictly defined functional scope that can be developed by multiple teams at once. Scrum is much more efficient, but it is far less predictable and you have to be alert all the time to solve challenges as they arise. As always communication is the key and Scrum supports that very well.

So far the team is happy with the approach and we’re delivering very fast. I’m also very enthusiastic and looking forward to deliver the final product.