AGILE Development – The Sprint Retrospective

Retrospective Phase

AGILE development and the AGILE team have proven to be effective in meeting today’s modern, trendy lifestyle; adjusting to any change requested during the development process. The greatest implementation that AGILE provides, where other development strategies fail, is the quick task sprint increments. It is from these sprints that the AGILE team has the versatility to adapt to trends and succeed where others fail. AGILE’s sprint implementation can be considered its ‘Ace in the Hole’ in development methodologies. Among  several features of the AGILE sprint, let us look into the sprint retrospective, an important transition between two sprints.

The sprint retrospective is the summary and review of the ending sprint’s results. The entire AGILE team, including product owners, are expected to collaborate during this discussion to achieve a mutual understanding of the product’s progression. The session is an interactive discussion that should run much longer than a normal scrum meeting, and has the potential to extend to follow-up meetings. The end goal of the session is to mutually make any adjustments necessary for the expected progression of the product. To achieve this result, the team uses many tools in the discussion such as the start-stop-continue method.

Start – Stop – Continue Method

Being the more preferred sprint retrospective approach, the start-stop-continue analyzes each task of the sprint’s period. The team evaluates a task under the conditions of its progression, difficulty and relevance. The task’s progression and difficulty go hand in hand during the development process, as new problems may arise during development. If either the difficulty is greater than expected or the progression is less than intended, the task’s state is set to stop or continue. The task is either drop from development completely or temporarily for a later time, or it is immediately appending to the task list for the following sprint. Any appended tasks can affect the design plan for the following sprint increasing the risk of delayed results, an outcome best to avoid. During the retrospective, the team also discusses any upcoming tasks and if they require any adjustments, which may have come to mind during the prior sprint’s development. This part of the discussion also entails topics of interest that were not discussed nor attended from prior sprints, if time permits.

The retrospective sprint allows the AGILE team to update the development process according to issues discovered. AGILE’s short increments of distributed tasks is the source for AGILE’s unparalleled versatility. The use of this tool is dependent on how effective an AGILE team collaborates with other members to reach a fully functioning product.

---

Mount Goat Software

Scrum Methodology

Deemer, P., Benefield, G., Larman, C., & Vodde, B. (2010). The scrum primer.Scrum Primer is an in-depth introduction to the theory and practice of Scrum, albeit primarily from a software development perspective, available at: http://assets. scrumtraininginstitute. com/downloads/1/scrumprimer121. pdf,1285931497.

AGILE Development – The Dream Team

Product Owner ; Scrum Master ; Developers and Testers

The AGILE development strategy is an essential tool for modern technology industries, providing the versatility to adapt to any changes that may arrive during the development process. The key beneficiaries from the adaptability of AGILE development is the development team responsible in providing the product. The AGILE development team consists of three defined groups and individuals: the Product Owner, the Scrum Master and Developers and Testers. The AGILE team is the backbone of the development process for it is the team which utilizes the benefits provided by AGILE development.

The product owner is commonly the customer or an affiliate, whose product the team is aiming to complete. The product owner is included in the team during the entire process of development due to their better understanding and vision of the final product. It is the collaboration between the product owner and the developers that the initial stages of the AGILE development process is completed. In between development sprints, the product owner can request changes for the final product.

The scrum master is the facilitator of the team, impartial to both the product owner and the developers and testers. It is the responsibility of the scrum master to ensure each scrum meeting effectively utilizes its limited time with progressive discussions. The facilitator also monitors the development team to ensure they meet daily objectives.

The developers and testers consist of a group of individuals responsible of producing and testing several installments to the product before the final deadline. It is the role of the developers and testers to produce each small installment of the product at the end of each sprint, resulting in a final and fully functioning product.

Agile Development with backlog implementation

An important feature of the AGILE development process is the product backlog. The product backlog serves as a repository for all the user stories defined during the initial phase of the planning process. The backlog takes each user story and prioritize them according to difficulty and realistic completion. The developing team evaluate each user story to reach a consensus and assign it a priority, making it an objective which are distributed throughout each sprint. The distribution of each objective commonly assigns one difficult task, a few mediocre tasks and several easy tasks to a single sprint, ensuring maximum progress in the product as a whole.

It is the AGILE team’s responsibility to collaborate with the customer to extract enough information from the customer to determine the most accurate description of the product. From their combined effort, the team and customer provide several user stories that clearly describe several features of the product. The team then takes these user stories and prioritizes and distributes them into one of several sprints for effective completion. This process is essential in the development process and the core of the initial planning phase, but its benefits are only effective if the team utilizes properly. This is why the AGILE team can make or break the AGILE development process, and each member of the team retains an irreplaceable responsibility. The backlog can be considered the backbone of the development plan which is ready to readjust when necessary, in between sprints. Without a product backlog, organization and proper planning will likely result in uncoordinated cooperation and unwanted outcomes.

---

Scaled Agile Framework

All About Agile

Dubakov, M., & Stevens, P. (2008). Agile Tools: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Report, TargetProcess, Inc.

AGILE Development – Modern Software Development Strategy

Agile versus Waterfall

Today’s fast paced, high demand, and competitive technology industry is in desperate need to adhere to the trendy lifestyle the world has become. The need to meet the consumers, ever changing, trends demands for optimized product development with the flexibility to quickly adjust to change. In this, modern technology industries strive in consumer trend environments and have become leading examples of successful business strategies for product development. Many leading companies achieve successful outcomes with the use of the AGILE Product Development Strategy. From successful start-ups, that adopt AGILE at the birth of their company, to older industry giants which are now transitioning to the development strategy, AGILE has proven again and again that it is the necessary development strategy to meet today’s trending market. What is AGILE and why is it praised with high esteem?

AGILE development is the product of a small group of individuals who realized that prior product development strategies failed more often than succeeded. The Agile Manifesto, as it was originally called, succeeds where prior methods failed by strictly adhering to four crucial foundations for effective development:

• Individuals and interactions over process and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

with several priorities defined from these foundations.

AGILE allows for versatility in development, collaboration and adaptation by withdrawing from prior static development strategies such as the Waterfall approach. One important feature of the AGILE strategy is the implementation of customer collaboration throughout the entire development process. At the start of the planning phase, the development team and the customer work together to breakdown the user’s vision of the product into several descriptive stories, a feature identified as the customer’s User Stories.

Agile Planning Phase

A user story is a short description of a feature the customer would like to have in their product. A normal user story follows a standard format to best describe the desired feature from the perspective of the intended target:

As a <target>, I would like <goal> so that <result>.

This format allows for a detailed description of a feature from different perspectives, providing a better understanding of the customer’s vision of their desired final product. It is the responsibility of the development team to communicate with the customer to provide as many user stories as possible to maximize understanding and mutual consensus. Once the team has gathered a successful amount of user stories, they are then placed into a product backlog for prioritizing and distribution.

The distribution of the results are spread about several short term development phases known as sprints. It is the concept of these sprints that allows AGILE to successfully adjust to the consumer’s trendy behavior and places it as the leading development strategy with greater success rates compared to its predecessors.

AGILE is still a new development strategy, created in 2001, yet it has proven itself to be the best approach for rapid product development with the versatility to adjust to any changes. Several adaptations to the AGILE method have sprouted since its creation and some companies have merged prior methods, such as Waterfall. AGILE development is adaptive enough to be collaborative with other strategies, but to fully utilize the power of the AGILE development strategy it should be applied in its entirety, as intended by the Agile Manifesto.

---

References:

Agile Manifesto

All About Agile

Vijayasarathy, L. E. O. R., & Turk, D. (2008). Agile Software Development: A survey of early adopters. Journal of Information Technology Management,19(2), 1-8.