Scrum in Startups
Here's an important saying in the entrepreneurship world: "Fail early". If you meet your market earlier even if your offer isn't perfect, you'll be able to work on it again and again and you'll have less chances to fail.
The great thing you have to know about agile startups is the release cycle. With a waterfall approach, a release cycle is about 3 or 4 months. With Scrum, your release cycles are your sprints which are about 2 to 4 weeks. At the end of your 2 to 4 weeks sprint, you'll have a shippable product. Therefore, you can imagine having 3 releases of your product shipped when you'll only have one with a waterfall approach. This is one of the most important agile principle and it's called iterations.
So with this method, you'll face your market in the early stage, and this is crucial. You need to reach your market during the development process, in order to know if your offer is consistent. If it's not and if you don't use Scrum, then you'll fail at the end point.
The notion of MVP (minimum viable product) summarize all this. A great example is better than a long explanation. Remember when Twitter was a small company? They shipped their MVP, a website where everyone could share what is on their mind. It was basically a 140 characters text sharing app. There was no feature. They watched their users and saw them happy. Then they started to implement their features.
The Scrum agile method emphasizes the fact that it needs small teams to perform well. Like between 3 to 8 people. It perfectly and immediately fits to a startup needs and helps getting everybody on the same page and getting motivated.
That's why it a very good idea to implement the Scrum framework in a startup.
But it's not reserved to startups only. Even Google uses Scrum, and it's not a startup anymore.
How to Write a User Story
User stories are short high-level requirements. It's one of the three major ways to specify requirements with traditional requirements and use cases. User stories focus on the interaction between the user and the system, and the benefits the user gets from the system.
A user story basically divided into 2 parts: the title and the description. The title has to be short and precise. The team must be able to clearly differentiate a user story from an other.
The description follows some rules and conventions. When you write a user story, you basically have to consider a template:
As a [role], I want to [goal] so that [reason].
Imagine this as
As a [who], I want to [what] so that [why].
For instance:
As a user, I want to read blog posts on the Scrumers blog so that I can keep updated on Scrum and Scrumers.
Again, it has to be short and easily understandable. If it's too long, try to write less details about it. Remember that you'll talk about it if you need to—it's not supposed to look like a documentation. Think of it as a To Do list.
You may also include the business value of your user story. The bigger the number representing the business value is—following the Fibonacci numbers—the more prior is the user story.
Then you have to write tasks corresponding to the user story. To do this, you basically need to write user acceptance tests. Think of it as a template like the description of the user story, but with other keywords:
Given [state]
When [action]
Then [result]
Here's a short example with only one scenario:
That's it! And once all of your acceptance tests are OK, then your user story will be completed and the business value will be burned.@signupFeature: User sign upIn order to create an accountAs a visitorI want to sign upScenario: Sign up successfulGiven I am a new visitorAnd I am on the signup formWhen I fill in "Username" with "my_username"And I fill in "Firstname" with "my_firstname"And I fill in "Lastname" with "my_lastname"And I fill in "Email" with "my@email.com"And I fill in "Password" with "my_password"And I fill in "Password confirmation" with "my_password"And I press "Submit"Then I should be redirected on the login formAnd I should receive an activation emailWhen I click the activation email linkThen I should see "Your account was successfully confirmed."
Scrumers Hackathon #1
Hi,
As you already know, an iPhone app will go with the Scrumers Web app. Last week, we planned our first hackathon at Scrumers HQ. It took only a dozen hours for us to develop Scrumers Mobile. The main features are there and we're now finishing some custom UI elements.
This is a good opportunity to talk to you about CoreCloud. CoreCloud is a framework we're developing which allows you to easily make requests to Web services. For Scrumers, it's even simpler because we have a REST API with JSON. But you can also do anything you want to. It's open source, you can fork us and start using it: http://github.com/scrumers/CoreCloud
Back on Saturday's WebWorkersCamp
Last Saturday, we were at the WebWorkersCamp at La Cantine in Paris. It was a BarCamp dedicated to original architecture and technologies which allow platforms to be scalable and realtime based. We can tell you that we met great people. Guest stars were also there: Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js and Richard Kreuter, developer of MongoDB.
We attended all the talks we could, such as JavaScript Everywhere, Node.js, MongoDB.
We encourage you to go to events like this one, and especially BarCamps because when you're in, your network grows like hell.
Thanks to all the organizers (Silicon Sentier & AF83) for making such an amazing event.
Ludovic Galabru with Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js
Credits photos: Luc Byhet
Get Ready, Scrumers Is Starting
We're going to roll out some invitations so you can start using it tomorrow. Like we said before, we've been hard working, especially on the features we implemented and on the design.
We hope you'll enjoy it as much as we do.
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Video Tour Is Up
As of today, you can see an early preview of what Scrumers is capable
of by watching our Featured Tour: http://scrumers.com/tour. This video
shows the basics of Scrum when using Scrumers.
We're now seven days before the launch!
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Some updates regarding our progression
Hi everyone,
It's been a while! We've got some updates for you. Scrumers is almost there!Since January, we've integrated EFREI incubator and we've been hard
working. A private beta is currently being tested out there and is
doing very well so far. Today we can officially tell you that Scrumers will land on June 30th,
2010. We really can't wait for you to use it. It's a new approach to
project management with Scrum, and we're sure it will help you being
more efficient. If you love Scrum, you'll love Scrumers. Any questions? Don't hesitate to get in touch with us: team@scrumers.com.
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Hello world !
We are working hard for delivering a terrific product, aiming at helping developers and companies with agile’s philosophy.
It’s official, we will integrate the EFREI’s incubator in January. EFREI (French School of Electronics and Computer Science) is a French private engineering school located in Paris. Its courses, specializing in computer science and management, are taught with support from the state. Students who graduate earn an engineering degree accredited by the CTI (national commission for engineering degree accreditation). The degree is equivalent to a master’s degree in the European higher education area. Leave us your details on http://www.scrumers.com, be patient, and Scrumers will rock your world :-).
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