Agile setup

Roles

Product owner

– representing the product’s stakeholders and the voice of the customer
– responsible for delivering good business results
– is accountable for the product backlog and for maximizing the value that the team delivers
– defines the product in customer-centric terms (typically user stories)
– adds stories to the product backlog, and prioritizes them based on importance and dependencies

Development team

– three to nine members
– anyone who plays a role in the development and support of the system or product (researchers, architects, designers, data specialists, statisticians, analysts, engineers, programmers, testers)
– The team is self-organizing
– no work should come to the team except through the product owner
– the scrum master is expected to protect the team from too much distraction

Scrum master

– Helping the product owner maintain the product backlog
– Helping the team to determine the definition of done for the product, with input from key stakeholders
– Educating key stakeholders on Agile and Scrum principles
– Coaching the team

Workflow

Sprint (2W/3W)

Sprint review (2h/3h)

– presents the completed work to the stakeholders (Incomplete work cannot be demonstrated)
– collaborates with the stakeholders on what to work on next

Sprint planning (4h/6h)

– Select product backlog items that can be completed in one sprint
– Prepare a sprint backlog
– Agree the sprint goal, a short description

part 1 (2h/3h)

– scrum team selects the product backlog items they believe could be completed in that sprint

part 2 (2h/3h)

– development team identifies the detailed work resulting in a confirmed sprint backlog
– some product backlog items may be split or put back into the product backlog if the team no longer believes they can complete the required work in a single sprint

Sprint retrospective (1,5h/~2h)

– Reflects on the past sprint
– continuous process improvement
– What went well during the sprint?
– What did not go well?
– What could be improved for better productivity in the next sprint?

Daily scrum (15m)

– What did I complete yesterday / What do I plan to complete today / Do I see any impediment
– No detailed discussions should happen during the daily scrum

Backlog refinement (~3h)

– backlog management meeting
– Product Owner, Development Team part.,
– facilitated by the ScrumMaster
– aka Grooming

Artifacts

Increment

a concrete stepping stone toward the Product Goal. Each Increment is additive to all prior Increments and thoroughly verified, ensuring that all Increments work together. In order to provide value, the Increment must be usable. Multiple Increments may be created within a Sprint.

Product backlog

– ordered list (risk, business value, dependencies, size, and date) of product requirements that a scrum team maintains for a product
– features, bug fixes, non-functional requirements
– contains the product owner’s assessment of business value and the development team’s assessment of development effort (time or story points using the rounded Fibonacci scale)

Sprint backlog

– may be broken down into tasks by the development team
– team members sign up for (or pull) tasks as needed according to the backlog priority and their own skills and capacity
– no additional work can be added to the sprint backlog except by the team
– Once a sprint has been delivered, the product backlog is analyzed and re-prioritized if necessary, and the next set of functionality is selected for the next sprint

User story

– user story is an informal, natural language description of one or more features of a software system
– As a “type of user”, I can “some goal” so that “some reason”.
– can contains sub tasks, mainly created by developers

Epic

– Large stories or multiple user stories that are very closely related are summarized as epics. A common explanation of epics is also: a user story that is too big for a sprint.

Acceptance Criteria

– a test conducted to determine if the requirements of a User story or task are met.

Extensions

Story map

– A story map is a graphical, two-dimensional visualization of the product backlog.

Use case

– interactions between a role (known in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as an actor) and a system to achieve a goal

Sprint burndown chart

Definition of ready (DoR)

Definition of done (DoD)

Velocity

Spike

– A time-boxed period used to research a concept or create a simple prototype
– tasks which don’t directly generate value

Don’ts

• Teams whose members are geographically dispersed or part-time
• Teams whose members have very specialized skills
• Products with many external dependencies
• Products that are mature or legacy or with regulated quality control
• roles that don’t exist e.g. Project Manager