Inbound Team Developer Breaks Scrum Prejudices Through 6-Sprint Experience

A junior developer on Kurly's Inbound team shared the real-world effects of adopting Scrum, based on experience running 6 sprints. Initially perceived as 'forcing an unreasonable schedule,' the practice revealed clear benefits in terms of reduced communication costs and shared goals among team members as a result of operating it.

Key Outcomes of Running Scrum

• Streamlined Communication: Visualizing work progress through the sprint board enabled proactive responses, such as QA writing test scenarios in advance.
• Established Retrospective Culture: Regular retrospective sessions produced process improvement action items and boosted productivity, including shortening story review time.
• Increased Domain Understanding: Rotating ticket assignments strengthened the capability to quickly respond to deployment issues even for developers who weren't the main developer on a given area.
• Schedule Estimation Autonomy: By having developers present rationale for story points and negotiate with the PO, it became possible to establish reasonable development plans without sudden schedule pressure.

Operational Precautions

To maintain Scrum's effectiveness, avoiding the addition of tickets after a sprint starts is essential. Except in cases requiring urgent deployment, operational issues should be deferred to the next sprint in order to achieve the initial goals. Additionally, for teams handling multiple domains, it is efficient to designate a primary project for each developer to manage in order to reduce context-switching costs.