Key concepts for succeeding in Agile for a newbie.
Super quick concepts explanation for someone who is brand new to agile.
Understand what Agile is
Agile is a mindset which aims at delivering value to a customer as soon as possible, reducing risks usually associated with waterfall products.
Know how does agile differs from Scrum or Kanban?
Scrum and Kanban are two types most widely used Agile methodologies. Scrum is the most used agile methodology(~95%) in Software Delivery Management. Kanban is good for production/ticket environment, another example is Coffee shop mugs at Costa or Starbucks.
What is a User Story, Feature and Epic?
User Story is the most basic building block of an scrum methodology. A User Story defines a independent unit which delivers some form of value to a consumer or customer. Complex or simple products are delivered using number of User Stories.
Number of User Stories are combined to make an independent features.
User Stories forms Features, Feature in turn forms Epics and Epics will deliver a Product over long/short term .
What is a Product Backlog?
Product Backlog is a log of user stories organized based on priority of feature to deliver value to a customer/consumers. To be fully accountable for a feature, always have it added to backlog, prioritize and size it to be ready.
What is Sprint?
Sprint is a fixed duration which a agile team undertakes to deliver piece/s of functionality called features. Its usually 2–4 weeks. Industry standard is 2 weeks. Each team discovers its own finely tuned sprint duration based on its experiences. Best is to start with 2 weeks and finely adjust based on first few iterations. Do not take more than 4 weeks since that will make your agile more of a waterfall.
Role of a Sprint Backlog
Sprint Backlog is a set of user stories which a agile team commits to deliver. Please note the keyword here: ‘commits’.
Definition of Ready
Definition of Ready for a User Story is the criteria used to evaluate if all the details are available before development/agile team can proceed with work. It applies at a User Story.
Definition of Done(DoD)
Definition of Ready for a User Story is the criteria used to evaluate if all work for a user story or user stories or sprint or release has been accomplished and can be marked as completed.
Tools to manage Agile
One can start experimenting with Atlassian Jira or Microsoft’s Azure Devops boards. Both are free for 5 member teams.
Make sure details and communications are in these tools for transparency and accountability. Anything outside these tools have no values.
What about SAFe, LeSS?
- SAFe — Scaled Agile Framework
- LeSS — Large Scale Scrum
These are Agile enterprise agile frameworks. They provide broad guidelines at adopting agile at scale in most departments of an enterprise.
