The new project I am working on since seven months is called Erika and it is a beautiful 70 centimetre baby. Recently I started a thought experiment about the management style that me and my wife are using to raise the child. In this post I want to verify if our parenting process can be mapped to Scrum.
Scrum – in very few words
Scrum is a style of management from the class of the agile project management practices. More and more software developing companies switch to this process in order to be more flexible, have faster deliveries and make sure that the implemented functionality really matches the customer need.
Process
Scrum is an iterative process, based on a product backlog containing the prioritised requirements that need to be implemented by the team. In a sprint planning event, the team chooses the highes priority features that they think can be done and split them into tasks, tasks that will be implemented in a timeboxed period called a sprint and thus will be added to the sprint backlog. For the duration of the sprint, in an ideal world, the team members focus only on the tasks contained in the sprint backlog. They reduce meetings to a short daily scrum meeting where everyone learns about the progress, problems and next tasks of each team member. It is intended to have a potentially shippable product increment after each sprint, a product that will be presented in a sprint review to the stakeholders / customers, giving the opportunity for fast feedback.
Roles
- Product Owner: represents the products stakeholders and is accountable for the delivered product
- Team: responsible for delivering each sprint a product increment – members of the teams can have different responsibilities
- Scrum Master: facilitator that removes impediments for delivery and makes sure that the scrum process is followed
Spring vs. Our “Parenting” Process
The product we work on is the education of our little girl. We work in very small sprints, we do our sprint planning daily in the morning. The good things about this small sprints is, that we can combine the sprint planning and the daily scrum meeting into one event. One event that is usually done during breakfast. And we need no Jira instance to keep track of the progress, we usually memorise the tasks of the sprint and who they are assigned too. The baby is our product owner, she really owns the education we provide, she can’t even sell it or give it away. I must say, many Scrum teams have big problems, because the product owner does not communicate well with the customer’s stakeholders, or is just not available when you need him. We have a product owner who is also stakeholder and is a vital part of our team, always available.
The development team is composed of the parents and grandparents, but the grandparents only work part time, we granted them 90% leave periods a day. And they are allowed to do only the easy tasks: play, take a walk and buy some things. What I like most in our process is the immediate feedback you get, our product owner is very vocal. I never met a PO who takes her role that seriously. Shouting, throwing things around and crying are some of the tools that she uses to let you know if the job you do is good. You even get feedback before the sprint review that is held nightly.
| Scrum Elements | Parenting |
| Product owner | Baby |
| Dev. team | Parents and grandparents |
| Scrum master | Mother |
| Sprint | One day |
| Sprint planning | Daily – breakfast |
| Sprint review | Nightly |
| Sprint retrospective | In the morning |
| Product increment | Education |
Talking about the sprint review, based on the quality of the tasks you implemented daily (take a walk, change diapers, feed, get to sleep, play, make her laugh), the product owner baby shows you what she thinks about your work by the amount of sleep hours you are granted per night.
Getting back to the team, we change the role of scrum master, most of the time the mother has this role. I must admit I am also part of another scrum team, one that produces software and generates monthly some income for the family account. But it is not uncommon that the scrum master also has a development role. To ensure a better quality of the work we do, we adopted pair programming from Kent Beck’s groundbreaking Extreme Programming book. We call the tasks pair backside cleaning, pair feeding, pair nose cleaning and pair clothing. I can really say the quality is much better since implementing the pair jobs. The product owner shouts tend to be much softer.
Immediately when we wake up, we do our retrospective. Based on the level of nightly feedback / screams / feedings, we recap how often the baby slept during the last day, if we should change the times of the meals, the duration of the walks and the hour of the occasional bath. Sometimes good intended friends or family members visite us at a late hour and had a lot of fun playing with the product owner. This usually leads to a later sleeping time and an excited baby that is not interested in sleeping. And the team decides to not allow these kind of visits in the future – these decisions seldom have any effect.
Conclusions
I think there is some process overlapping between raising our child and managing software projects with Scrum. I hoped that I would find more parallels than I actually wrote down. But it was fun. And I am sure I would fail if I tried to do a comparison to the V-Model.