How to apply Scrum on multiple small projects for an advertising agency?

Question

I work for an advertising agency and we are just 2 developers. We both maintain a total of 120 WordPress sites. We often build 1 new site every month which is done by only one of us at a time (while the other one keeps doing maintenance work).

So, when we have to create a new site, we setup a dev server and work there until it's finished, then it goes to QA and then we push it live by manually deploying it to the production server.

On the other hand, we receive tons of maintenance requests on a daily basis. Some of them we have to do it directly on the live site and sometimes we create a staging server from the live one, do the work and then push live.

Since it's only 1 developer at a time, we don't create different branches on the GIT repositories. We just push the changes to the master branch of every project, and next!

Therefore, I have been thinking if we could implement at least part of the Scrum framework on this environment of multiple mini projects.

Does anyone know how can we achieve this here? I would like to improve our dev process by applying Scrum or something similar we could use (other than automated deployments and other stuff that might not be related to this particular subject)

I appreciate any help.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Scrum works best when it is used by a team that needs to synchronise their work. Now although your developers work on separate projects, it does sound that there is the need to synchronise setting up environments, testing and releases. It also sounds like the support activities may require some synchronisation.

You could potentially form a Scrum team consisting of your developers, QAs and anyone else responsible for product delivery.

Then create a backlog that consists of:

• Project development work
• Release activities
• Support work
• Any other activities necessary to deliver your products

The trick is to think of all of these activities as just backlog work items, rather than tracking them separately.

Initially it may still be that one developer is dedicated to a small project, but over time you may start to break project work down so that it can be worked on by more than one developer at a time. This will then give you a bit more flexibility.

I would suggest the steps to go through would be:

• Get a bit of training on Scrum (if you don't already have team members experienced with it)
• Think about who will be Scrum Master
• Think about who will act as the Product Owner: owning the backlog and making decisions on priorities
• Decide on a sprint length (shorter is better if your requirements change frequently)
• Hold a planning meeting to get started
• Hold a review at the end of the first sprint to decide if it was better than your usual way of working