Michigan Web Design Blog

Agile is individuals and interactions over process and tools, customer collaboration over contract negotiation and responding to change over following a plan. Release early release often and get feedback from the customer as soon as possible. The ability to respond to change, over following a plan, checking ones ego at the door, learning and building as a team, as projects succeed and fail throughout the life cycle is what Agile is.

What Agile Is Not

Being agile does not mean we are “code cowboys. Agile is not a hierarchy. Just because we are agile does not mean we do not write design documents.

Tools That Are Used For Agile

Scrum
Unit testing
Test Driven Development
Pair programming
Sprints/Iterations
Writing user stories
Continuous integration
Bug Tracking

What is Scrum

Project Management using Agile and Scrum

Definitions
Scrum Master:                  Maintains the processes and works similar to a project manager
Product Owner:                Represents the stakeholders and the team which includes the developers
The Product Backlog:     Simply a list of all things that need to be done to the product
The Sprint Backlog:         A list of items that will be completed during the sprint
Sprint:                                                  Iteration during which work is being completed
Daily Scrum Meeting:    Meeting which occurs every day that allows team members to give updates on the status of the current sprint.
Staging:                                Area where code is installed after the sprint has been completed
Acceptance Testing:       The acceptance test is the last opportunity customers have to make sure the product iteration matches either expectation for the sprint.

Product Backlog

The product backlog in is simply a list of things needed to be done at some point in the future of the product development. The product backlog always lists items adding value for the customer. It includes functional requirements and non-functional requirements. It can also include items required by the team, but only the ones that will eventually bring value to the customer.
The product backlog should not include concrete low level tasks and requests for building the intermediate artifacts. For example, it should not include an issue for producing a design document unless customer has to ship it further for some purpose.
The Product backlog utilizes the simplest and the most effective way for prioritizing requests - a simple list. Such a method does not allow for having 100 absolute max priority features and forces the product owner to actually make decisions about the feature priorities.
The ease of use, clear and transparent purpose is what makes the product backlog so useful for seeing into the project status.

Sprint Backlog

The sprint backlog is the list of tasks that the Scrum team is committing that they will complete in the current sprint. Items on the sprint backlog are drawn from the Product Backlog, by the team based on the priorities set by the Product Owner and the team's perception of the time it will take to complete the various features.

It is critical that the team selects the items and size of the sprint backlog. Because they are the ones committing to completing the issues they must be the ones to choose what they are committing to.

During the sprint the team members will maintain the sprint backlog by updating it to reflect which tasks are completed and how long the team thinks it will take to complete those that are not yet done.
The estimated work remaining in the sprint is calculated daily and graphed, resulting in a sprint burndown chart like this one:

The team does its best to pull the right amount of work into the sprint but sometimes too much or too little work is pulled in during the sprint planning meeting. In this case the team needs to add or remove issues