Finally, A Sprint-Sprint!

I imagine SCRUM uses the term "sprint" for development iterations to emphasize the quickness of the cycles to deliver shippable functionality. As I've written about before, I'm implementing a one-man SCRUM development team. This last sprint began seven days ago and was complete last night.

That was, by far, my fastest development sprint since starting the project. I believe there were two main reasons why I was able to accelerate my development this time. 

One Man SCRUM

My first job as a freshly minted computer engineer was working as a real-time embedded developer with a defense contractor. When I was there everything lived and died by The Master Schedule - put together by some poor systems engineer who worked on it for hours. The venerable schedule was so detailed I wonder what percentage of time was used to simply develop the thing compared to the time to actually implement the project. 

But the schedule very much dictated a rigid waterfall approach to development. On one of my solo projects I proposed to the program manager that I would be implementing the software using an iterative approach called SCRUM. He looked at me as if I suddenly decided to start speaking Japanese. 

Suffice to say there really wasn't any drive to go beyond a waterfall approach. But I knew there were other ways to develop software and I wanted to try them.