I had some time to reflect on family life over the last few weeks. The result being that I decided to start a 960 iteration Scrum project; on my life. It sounds like a joke, but I really think it makes sense and will work. Consider the following:

• It is very natural to have an iteration length of one month, it is anyway the frequency we turn the page over on our wall calendar.
• We already have a huge backlog of things that need to be done, lawns that have to be mown, a garage that has to be cleaned, birthdays that have to be attended to, etc.
• At the beginning of each month we sit down and decide what we have to do this month and add events to the calendar. In connection to the calendar we also have a to-do list where we add prioritized stuff that we want to do this month, e.g. cleaning out the closet. We are making our “iteration backlog” visible. If we have to skip something on the backlog we can add it the next month instead.
• The Scrum meeting is held every evening at the dinner table.
• Regarding team size we are still on the small side. We are four at the moment of whom two doesn’t contribute very much (ages 2 years and 2 weeks). But if my wife gets to decide, team size will increase. I’m not so sure myself.
• The number of iterations depends of course on my health.

Anyway my point here is that Scrum is really intuitive and self-evident, in family life as well as in software projects.

Posted by Jens on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 2:18 pm.