As a one-man Scrum team, a lot of the framework provided with Scrum and Agile can be hard to apply. For example, how do I define a sprint goal for my team when I am the team, or how do I determine how much work the team is capable of when again, I’m the team.

Shouldn’t being a single person scrum team make these easier to accomplish? I mean it would stand to reason yes as I don’t have to confer with others on a sprint goal and who better to know my own capabilities than myself. The issues arise in a few places.

The most important being, as someone who is new to scrum how will I know I’m setting a realistic or achievable sprint goal. How will I know I’ve chosen the right goal for that given part of development?

Another given issue is with being the one who sets the goal and the timeframe who’s going to keep my honest and working as hard as I can without burning out? I can push myself incredibly hard and burn out after one sprint or I could accomplish almost nothing because I just didn’t feel like it and didn’t have to answer to anyone.

Thankfully, the first issue can be solved by researching sprint planning. In “Creating a Sprint Backlog: Your Guide To Scrum Project Management” by Dana Brown, she details how to create a sprint goal, how to create a sprint backlog, and how to prioritize tasks.

She highlights the first two steps of sprint planning as setting a sprint goal and identifying important product backlog items. Thankfully this is where my first issue is solved. As someone inexperienced to scrum, I would start at step two which is identifying the important product backlog items and using those to create a sprint goal. This way my sprint goal is relevant and knocks off the items highest on the priority list.

From there I can breakdown my product backlog items into smaller tasks and add them to the spring backlog. Finally organizing these tasks based of their priority and prerequisite tasks.

So, my first issue has been resolved, I now have a method of creating a sprint goal relevant to what’s highest priority. As for my second issue, unfortunately I don’t think I’m going to find an answer to that one online. It’s going to be trial and error as well as being completely honest with myself on whether the workload is too much or too little. Ultimately, it’s going to come down to how disciplined I can be.

From the blog CS@Worcester – DPCS Blog by Daniel Parker and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.