Thisarticlewas originally published byBuilt In.
Nowadays there are more opinions on how to develop software than there are firms actually doing the development.
Some people call programming a science.
Others call it engineering, a craft, or even art.
In recent times, no framework has seen broader adoption and more hype than the scrum implementation of agile.
Scrum, one such variant, has proven very popular.
Scrum, on the other hand, really didnt match our needs very well.
Roles
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Right from the get-go, this division of labor didnt make sense at 4Degrees.
But I was also doing most of the actual programming.
If we were to have a scrum master, that probably would have fallen to me as well.
Clearly it didnt make sense for me to beall threeof the distinct scrum roles.
We decided to set up our team a bit differently than the scrum structure.
Speed
Oftentimes, scrum is thought of as a very fast-paced framework for software development.
Not so in the startup world.
When youre just getting started, you might be a completely different company in two weeks.
Planning to modernize your production program only twice a month is a recipe for disaster and unhappy customers.
At 4Degrees, we deploymuchmore frequently: typically two to five times per day.
That allows us to get out important updates quickly and divide work into more atomic units with fewer dependencies.
Instead of sprints, we structure our development cycles into one-week and one-quarter increments.
We analyze our customer insights and brainstorm major initiatives that may improve the project.
That effort results in a roadmap of new functionality for the quarter.
Scrum prescribes epics, stories, and tasks to ensure that the customer perspective is translated into functionality.
At 4Degrees, all technical work is simply recorded as tasks: line items in our Airtable database.
Customer centricity is the first of our five corporate values and is deeply integrated into our process.
Specifically, whenever a new task is added, I will assign that task a priority and point value.
Point targets are set and measured at the individual level rather than the team level.
Weve found that this works better because our team is so small and relatively divided in its responsibilities.
The most important concept to take from agile is being quick and responsive to things that dont work.
For many startups, the overly structured and relatively slow nature of scrum just doesnt make sense.
