Jens Oliver Meiert

Micro-Scrum

Published on AprĀ 1, 2025, filed under (feed). (Share this on Mastodon orĀ Bluesky?)

Imagine you worked like this:

  1. At the start of the week: Get together with the team to decide what to shipā€”bring liveā€”at the end of the week. Ideally, everyone contributes, but this is intentionally not a requirement.

  2. At the end of the week: Get together and look at what was shipped. Everyone high-fives or, together, lands on one lesson to learn.

Of course, this resemblesā€”for itā€™s inspired byā€”Scrum and XP. It reflects some key events and values of agile methodologies, from focusing on continuously shipping value to working as a team to learning together from the results.

This sort of micro-scrum can start out independent or complementary to other processes (unless it duplicates them, as would be the case with a functioning sprint goal, review, and retro process), which makes it easy to test and try.

You can even work like this without a team, when defining and reviewing your increments alone. (Iā€™m working like this in my projects, though Iā€™ve arrived at that mode of working in inspiration by Jake Knappā€™s and John Zeratskyā€™s Make Time, setting highlights for each day as well.)

Is this new? Yes and noā€”ā€œmicro-scrumā€ is being mentioned here and there; but some of the associated ideas, as with sprints, stand-ups, reviews, and retros seem less micro. But newness is not my pointā€”the point is to share and validate ideas. What do you think? What type of micro-scrum have you observed to work well? (Responses are best served on Mastodon.)

About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on November 9, 2024.

Iā€™m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and Iā€™m a web developer, manager, and author. Iā€™ve been working as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies youā€™ve never heard of and companies you use every day, Iā€™m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for Oā€™Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)