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

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)

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

Acceptance Criteria

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

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.

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

Increment

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