Explanation of Agile and Scrum concepts for the general public and startup members
Agile
If you ever heard the term agile and never gave it any importance because you were too busy creating your own applications from the ground and rushing to show results for entrepreneurship contests to secure financing, you were already being agile.
If you were trying to create a decent, or at least few pages to provide hints, documentation for your software applications because you were too resource focused on delivering software updates for the potential customers subscribed to your open beta-application, you were being agile.
If you kept a constant eye on the market monitoring the booming sector around you with new competitors appearing overnight and giving you ideas / mandatory need for adaptability and changes to be applied to stay up to date, you were being agile.
Flexible scope / Fixed costs
- Scope: survive and develop to make a profit, or look good enough for the financial stage.
- Fixed costs: money is just short so always stick to minimum and time speaking we work against the clock.
Scrum
If you were doing open development and failed at the market deployment the promised launch day, you were applying scrum principles.
“Failing fast” principle, come on… try to catch me in that regard, fail, learn and improve. Rapid learning by default, there is no other option to make it happen.
The scrum framework:
- Product owner prioritises a backlog of work
- The teams choose what they will be doing for the next 2 weeks
- Team develops and tests solutions until done
- Team demonstrates its completed work
- Reflect on what they have done in the 2 weeks
Participants:
- Product Owner (probably you, as a cofounder, have this role): you are out there understanding the stakeholders wants, adapting constantly to the backlog of work for the team, and prioritising. While maintaining the product vision.
- Scrum master ( probably you, as a cofounder, have this role): keeps the team working at a sustainable pace, acts as a spokesperson for the team and helps remove impediments.
- Developers: capable, independent individuals, who hold each other accountable and plan daily bases to deliver.
Use a Roadmap! A living document, a guide to get the project to the end goal.
More about agile: https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
More about Scrum: https://scrumguides.org/
