In this week I focused on teamwork and how to organize in a group of people using agile methods and artifacts.
A quick view of agile development
In the past weeks (week 5 and week 6) I talk about the tools GitHub provides to the developers in order to communicate with each other in order to save work time and ensure quality.
Most of these features are inspired by the agile methodologies, this philosophy of work is made by programmers to programmers in order to put in order all the thoughts and things that are involved in the software development.
Story cards
One of the pillars of the agile process are the story cards, which are created after knowing the requirements and the functions of the project.
As said, they have the information of a single function of the app, and also, they have the definition of done; that is the criteria to know if something is finished and no more work is needed to have this functionality in production.
Sprint planning, prioritization, and scrum poker
One sprint is a time-lapse when certain user stories must be done to achieve the timeline of the project.
This is discussed in a session that is called spring planning, here also is made prioritization where the product owner defines which features the system must have, which should have, could have, and won’t have.
And at the end is the scrum poker, where the team have cards with numbers, the lower number represents the easy work that doesn’t need so much work, and the highest means that the story is hard.
This helps the team to have a better perspective about the scope and work change of the team members.
Communication in the process.
In order to don’t lose communication with the team, and to have a better perspective about how the work is making done, there is a session called the stand-up.
The stand-up is a little session where each developer of the team speaks in a few words on which worked yesterday, today, and if is any blocker in his/her job.
Also, having internal rules about how the team works make things more organized and puts on paper what the team members spec from each other, this is called the social contract.
And finally, are the big visible charts, which are the scoreboards of how the project is going with all the number of the story points are remaining and how many are done.
The end of the sprint
In the end, there is feedback about how the process of the sprint was carried out, this session is called the retrospective.
In this session, every member of the team shares their thoughts about what goes good on the sprint, what goes wrong, and any other feedback to be improved in the next iteration to don’t repeat the same errors.
After each iteration, there’s also an artifact called the BurnUp Chart. This chart has the points that the team made, the projection of the points, and the total points in order to know how the work is progressing.
Final thoughts
In the end, as the name said, the agile methodology is something that can be changed to whatever works better for the team, in this stage of my career I get involved in a real project with a client get organized is one of the trickier things.
The team doesn’t really apply all the rules and sessions of the agile methodology but is a great start point to check what is going to happen and how is going to be the structure of the project.
