This is a new presentation with the goal of sharing our lessons learned in the adoption of an agile project management approach, with a focus on Scrum, within our web development (Drupal) agency.

The rules and practices for Scrum - a simple process for managing complex projects - are few, straightforward, and easy to learn. But Scrum’s simplicity itself - its lack of prescription - can be disarming, and new practitioners often find themselves reverting to old project management habits and tools and yielding lesser results.

One of the biggest development hurdles we face when new to any agile framework is switching from a ‘phased’ approach to a ‘vertical slice’ approach.  Individuals and teams often aren’t used to deconstructing projects and problems in this way and we often hear “what about the dependancies” or “the system is too complex”.

In order to speed up feedback loops and provide instant value to clients, we can take a large feature and break it up into several small pieces that slice through each of the systems architectural layers. We can break down almost any of the features we do within projects into slices that take a couple of days, at most, to get out the door. Each slice is comprised of any work needed to be done in a system architectural layer, as well as, any testing that may need to be done to make it ready for deployment.