Part 2: Roles

In 2016 my wife and I married. In order to support the planning of the wedding, I introduced Scrum. In this blog, I will share our experience of this experiment.

This is the second out of 5 parts. In this part I will explain how the special Scrum context of wedding planning affects the Scrum roles.These are the other parts of this blog:

• Part 1: Motivation and the context of wedding planning
• Part 3: Artefacts
• Part 4: Events
• Part 5: The definition of “Done” and the conclusion

Roles

The Scrum Team consists of the Roles Scrum Master, Product Owner and Development Team. The Scrum Master and Product Owner roles are incorporated by one individual each while the rest of the Scrum Team are members of the Development Team. According to the Scrum Guide¹ the ideal Development Team size is considered to be between three and nine members.

Outside the Scrum Team are the stakeholders who discuss the requirements with the Product Owner.

Wedding planning is a special context in which only two individuals are involved, the bride and the bridegroom.

On the one hand, both incorporate the role of the stakeholders, since the bride and the bridegroom determine the requirements for the wedding.

On the other hand, they also form the Scrum Team:

• They identify and order the items which need to be addressed.
• They estimate the resources necessary to complete a working item.
• They complete working items.

In Scrum the identification is handled by the Product Owner. The estimations and the completions of working items are covered by the (Development) Team. Usually, the Product Owner is not part of the Development Team, nor are the stakeholders who are not even members of the Scrum Team.

The idea behind introducing the Scrum roles is that one individual is responsible for managing the working items independently (the Product Owner) while the team decides when (i. e. in which sprint) to implement which of the working items. If an individual incorporates more than one role these roles might conflict.

However, in a context in which just two individuals are involved it is inevitable that these individuals take over several (potentially conflicting) roles. Therefore, we tried to resolve potential conflicts by temporal separation of roles. That means that we split the entire process into three phases: The stakeholder or requirements phase, the Product Owner phase and the implementation phase.

The stakeholders phase

The stakeholders phase is the phase, during which we determined the rough requirements for the wedding like:

• the date of the wedding day
• the location for the registry office wedding
• the location for the wedding celebration
• the type of wedding celebration
• the number of guests (a range between “close family and friends” and “everyone we know”)
• general aspects of marriage which have to be considered (music, photographer, food, order of events, general direction of the decoration, etc.)
• other aspects important for the wedding day

The stakeholders phase happened once in the beginning of the wedding planning to develop and clarify the basic requirements and each time new requirements were introduced.

After the requirements had been clarified the Scrum Team took over. As my wife and I had been the stakeholders in the requirements phase we had a good understanding of the stakeholders’ needs.

The Product Owner phase

The Product Owner phase occurred directly after the stakeholders phase and whenever the Product Owner was required during a sprint.

In this phase I incorporated the role of the Product Owner to maintain the Product Backlog.

After the stakeholders phase I first tried to become familiar with the administrative requirements for marrying in Germany which depends on your background (unmarried vs. divorced, nationality or migration background) and therefore can become quite complex (see ²). Fortunately, we experienced the minimal administrative complexity as we both were two unmarried Germans.

I broke down the administrative requirements to the following working items:

• reserving the date for the registry office wedding
• gathering the extended registration certificate for both of us
• gathering a copy of the birth certificate of the birthplace of each of us
• applying for marriage at the local registry office¹

Then I ordered them according to their dependencies and priorities and added them to the Product Backlog with the proposed month of implementation in order to respect the temporal dependencies of these working items.

Afterwards I broke down the stakeholders’ requirements into working items, entered these items into the Product Backlog and ordered them according to their dependencies.

I also added further working items which I found in a helpful guide for wedding planning³.

During a sprint I took over the Product Owner role whenever necessary. During the Sprint Planning I tried in an almost schizophrenic way to incorporate the Product Owner as well as the Development Team member role. Usually, as the Product Owner, I proposed the items which should be implemented due to their priority, dependencies and proposed sprint of completion. The proposed sprint had been entered while a working item had been added to the Product Backlog. Then my wife and I decided as the Development Team which working items we would actually process in that sprint.

During the sprint itself I as the Product Owner focused on maintaining the Product Backlog (adding emerging working items, marking completed items as done and reordering items if necessary).

The implementation phase

The implementation phase started right after the initial Product Backlog setup by the Product Owner after the stakeholders phase. This was the phase in which the sequence of sprints took place as described in the Scrum Guide¹. This phase ended on our wedding day. During that phase, my wife and I took over the Development Team member role to implement the working items and to add new items to the Product Backlog which arose during the implementation process.

Furthermore, I updated the Product Backlog during the implementation phase to keep track of the changes of the Increment and those resulting from the Scrum events.

Footnotes

1. In Germany you apply for marriage at your local registry office presenting the necessary documents depending on your background. These documents expire after six months so you have to take care that not too much time elapses between gathering these documents and applying at the local registry office. The local registry office then checks whether you are allowed to marry (e. g. by checking whether you are not already married). If they approve, you can marry at any registry office in Germany within six months. After six months the marriage permit expires.