A primer for Agile Development.
Enter Agile Development…
Main Definition — Agile involves iterative devleopment in the product cycle including planning, designing, building, testing, reviewing.
Main Roles — Everyone in the team is invovled within the product(engineers, designers, product managers, business development)
Agile Principles
- Working software is delivered frequently (weeks no months)
- Simplicity is building only what is really essential, no fluff
Agile Team
- Product Owner — Represents end customer. Defines what is valuable and prioritizes the backlog.
- Scrum Master — facilitates team meetings, removes team impediments, liaises with product owner to ensure the team remains on track.
- Delivery Team — people in charge of execution or that are part of the project’s team(i.e., developer, tester)
Some Tools to Use
Burn Down Chart — Chart showing remaining work to be done, progress overtime, and the team’s velocity
Agile Board — A visual board to track work and progress in a logical flow (from left to right)
Key Concepts
User Stories — As a … <user>… I want…<what>…so that…<why>
Key things to focus on are story points, acceptance criteria, should be independent, negotiable, valuable, estimate, sized approiately
Story Points — Relative unit of measure to access whether a user story is big or small. An example is unit of size for a t-shirt(s,m,l,xl)
Product Backlog — Ordered list of everything to be done for the product
Sprint Backlog — Backlog for the sprint
MVP — minimum viable product(bare minimum for the client) which includes all the must-haves and excludes all the nice-haves (no bells or whistles)
Rituals of the Agile
- Sprint Planning — Team defines user stories. Main team members involved include scrum master and delivery team.
- Daily Standups — 15min daily meeting to discuss what they did, what they are doing, and any problems they have.
- Sprint Review — Team presents what they delivered over a sprint to the product owner.
- Retrospectives — Meetings done after sprints to review and revise.
There you have it. Your crash article in Agile Development. I hope you find it useful especially if you are new to Agile.
https://medium.com/open-product-management/crash-article-in-agile-development-da960861259e