How we implemented Scrum in an Agile Community

In November 2020, we founded Women in Agile Toronto, a Local group linked with Women in Agile (WIA), a non-profit organization and collective effort to recruit, network, promote, and support the work of outstanding women in the agile community through blogging, speaking at events, and building a network surrounded by people of all genders.

After registering the group under WIA, defining our purpose and goal as a value for the community, We identified our audience and defined our way of work. But, how did we did that?

First of all, we analyzed our audience to start creating a persona to look at specific members of that crowd. Yes, we only started because it's a never-ending job.

Then, we began our dream list; everything that we'd produce for our community. Our backlog was an extensive list. So many features are prioritized by effort and complexity to be executed. As a volunteering operation, time management is essential, so we need to focus on simple things with value to be delivered as quickly as possible.

The fixed time-box was determined as 4-weeks long for each work based on our definition of done. We worked on infrastructure, structure, tools and templates during sprints 1, 2 and 3. After each release, the review's output and our retrospective following every webinar increased the backlog that we used to plan our next workstream. In the retrospectives, we analyzed duration, attendance, remaining until the end of the event, interaction during the Q&A session, comments in zoom meeting chat and Linkedin, and survey responses.

Over time, as a result, we:

• Optimized the time spent on repetitive activities with standardization and automatization.
• We have reduced the number of artifacts to be created with a lean workflow.
• Simplified the workstream, decreasing the number of supporting tools.

In the end, we gain agility and quick response to changes, and we look forward to the 2022 planning where we'll amplify our scope.