COEPD – Center of Excellence for Professional Development Happy Learning
Agile Project Management:
Agile project management is an iterative approach to manage software development projects that focuses on continuous releases and incorporating customer feedback with every iteration.
- In Agile Project Management, testing and development processes are performed concurrently.
- It follows an iterative organizational structure.
- Client involvement is there in each and every sprint.
- A change in software at any stage is acceptable in this methodology.
- Most of the software firms are using this methodology.
Models supported Agile Software Development:
- Scrum
- Extreme Programming (XP)
- Crystal
- Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)
- Feature Driven Development (FDD)
- Adaptive Software Development (ASD)
Scrum Agile Methodology:
Scrum is a framework for agile project management that uses fixed-length iterations of work called sprints. There are four ceremonies that bring structure to each sprint.
Characteristics of Sprint:
- Sprints are timeboxed
- There is a start and end date defined for each sprint.
- Timeboxing helps teams to prioritize and manage their work accordingly and work at an optimum pace.
- Sprints are for short duration
- Easier to plan and manage.
- Ensure periodic and quick feedback.
- Sprints have a consistent duration
- All Sprints are of same time duration.
- There is a definite sprint goal
- Sprint goal states the business purpose and value of the sprint.
- Sprint goal induces mutual commitment and should not be changed.
- Sprints are associated with review and feedback
- Platform to demonstrate the work done and is a celebration moment.
Scrum ceremonies associated with Sprint:
- Sprint Planning
- Team understands and decides the contents of the sprint.
- Team does a reasonable estimation on the sprint items.
- Daily Scrum
- What you did yesterday?
- What are you planning today?
- Are there any impediments?
- Sprint Review
- Happens at the end of each sprint
- Team showcases the work completed
- Stakeholders provide their feedback for improvement
- Product owner approves the deliverables
- Sprint Retrospection
- What went well?
- What didn’t go so well?
- What should we improve?
Benefits of using sprints in Agile:
- Sprint forces prioritization of work.
- Sprint demonstrates the team’s iterative progress, which adds interest in them through gratification on accomplished work.
- Sprint provides a platform for continuous feedback and validation of the deliverables.
- Sprint avoids gold plating and unnecessary perfectionism.
- The team understands what they can complete in a sprint, which improves the predictability of what they will accomplish shortly.
- The team learns to work at an optimal pace, which saves the team from days of boredom and overload days.
- Sprint makes team understand the importance of mutual commitment which is beneficial for business and growth.
Scrum Team:
- Development team: Development team members are the ones who have boots on the ground and are actually doing the work.
- Scrum master: The Scrum master is a team leader who helps everyone abide by Scrum theories and practices and enables better team interactions.
- Product owner: The product owner is accountable for the work of the Scrum team and oversees the product or output of the team.
- Stakeholders: Stakeholders are business or project stakeholders who have an interest in what the Scrum team is developing, but aren’t directly involved in the process of creating it.
Product backlog and sprint back log:
Product Backlog:
- Requirement of the entire product is captured in Product backlog. A list of everything needed in the project.
- It is owned by Product owner.
- Requirements are captured in Product backlog in the form of User stories, Feature and epics.
- It is ordered based on the business priority number.
- Technical stories that are needed to enable the product features are also included in Product backlog.
- Scrum teams work on ongoing releases of a single product which essentially means that the product backlog is never complete.
- The first version contains requirements best understood by everyone and from there on the Product Owner keeps adding/removing items based on how valuable they are to the company.
Sprint Backlog:
- Subset of Product backlog. A list of everything to be built during the sprint.
- Owned by development team
- Technical tasks related to user stories
- Efforts estimates in hours for tasks
- Identified as part of sprint planning meeting
- Essentially items are moved to sprint backlog from the product backlog during sprint planning.
- At the end of each sprint, the team has an increment which is reviewed and delivered.
