We have a major upcoming project here at Cocomore which is in the initial planning phase. It’s too early to provide the finer details of the project, but it involves creating a product database for a large publishing house and Drupal 7 has been chosen as the project framework. By mid-June, we will likely have four developers working on it, full-time. Of course, anyone who deals with software development almost certainly knows the problems that tend to occur during the planning of large-scale, long-term projects like this one: in the beginning, the client is often not yet 100% certain of their needs or desired end results, so new requirements and ideas arise in the middle of project development. This means that projects built to the initial specifications often fail to completely meet the client’s needs, which can be disappointing for everyone involved.
Hoping to avoid this scenario, we (our software development team, and project and senior management) proposed implementing the project using Scrum. This allows us to flexibly respond to changes in requirements and keeps the customer closely tied to the project development process so we can avoid unpleasant surprises at the end of development. At a recent Cocomore “KnowledgeLab”, I presented a brief overview of Scrum methodology, a topic which is certainly too broad to cover, in-depth, in an hour-long presentation. So I limited the scope of my presentation to the most essential elements of the Scrum process: roles, events, and artifacts; then used Lego Scrum to try to better illustrate the model. This article provides an overview of the same basic concepts covered in our workshop session and describes how I helped immerse team members who had not previously worked with Scrum in the concepts and processes. We have been using Scrum for other “ambitious” Drupal projects and plan to provide in-depth case studies for some of them, with details about more specifics related to Drupal; this article provides a general foundation for understanding these upcoming case studies.
Scrum: a process model for agile software development
Agile software development is characterized primarily by an iterative procedure with alternating planning and development phases. The advantage this provides is that parts of the system are developed early on and can be tested before implementation of other parts. This reduces the risk that project development heads in the wrong direction. Rather, responding quickly and flexibly to changes in the requirements, the components of a system can be redefined to best meet a client’s real needs.
