If you aren’t aware of how the Agile Music Project works, go read the first couple posts, or the about page, for a description of how we are attempting to use agile software development practices for creating music. Specifically, we are following a process called Scrum. For those of you who may not be familiar with the process, check out the Scrum Primer or the Scrum Guide.
Agile software development requires processes to coordinate between many independent developers. The lessons we learned from practicing Agile in the software world translated well to our band. For instance, we worked in two week sprints and planned goals for each sprint. We had daily “stand-up” meetings to keep everyone updated on our individual progress. At the end of a sprint, we evaluated our goals and measured our progress so that we knew approximately how much we could get done next time. This let us ensure and monitor that the band is making progress all the time, and we didn’t stagnate (hopefully).
We could each have tasks for a song to write or record our parts, and the final mixing step was somewhat analogous to QA finding bugs and smoothing out the resulting work. Ohm Studio really functioned as a sort of source-control for us, while Logic Pro functioned as an IQA environment to fine tune the product for deployment. Releasing the song on the internet (via Sound Cloud and our website) functioned as a final deployment to production. Once we began drawing these parallels, we were able to use the workflows and solutions we found in the software world to create solutions for the band.
I have since seen several talks and publications about using Scrum and other Agile practices for other tasks outside of software development. Specifically, our band was mentioned in the book “Agile Changed My Life” by D Ray Freeman. So it seems this is not a unique idea to our band. However, reading about it and actually doing it were completely different beasts.
If anyone has experience applying Agile or Scrum to other tasks, or would like some help doing so, let us know!
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