Agileista

While the process framework behind Scrum and Agile in general gets you thinking about how you organise the work and the facilitate the team, it's only half the story.

For software development teams there are some engineering practices that can help the team code well within the people and organisational processes that Agile implements. The aim of these engineering practices is to allow the development team to create the best software product possible. These are enabling approaches that allow us to focus on the most important aspect of software development; not engineering practices but building the right software.

I'm going to give a brief overview of an Agile development process called SCRUM. At the end of this article are some links to further information for those of you that want to read about SCRUM in more depth.

First some terminology:

• Scrum Master - The person who enables the Scrum process, a facilitator
• Product Owner - The person ultimately responsible for defining the product and its features
• Iteration - A set cycle of development time
• Sprint - Scrum name for the iteration cycle
• Development team - Everyone it takes to get from requirement to tested releasable code (coders, testers, Q&A, Analysts, DBA's etc)
• Velocity - A measure of the completed features for a given iteration

Before I get into my experiences of implementing Agile lets take a brief look at some background.

Agile refers to a conceptual framework of processes for managing high risk, high entropy projects such as software development. The Agile Alliance has this to say -

I've been having what could only be described as a good time implementing Agile methodologies with the development team at work. We've been merrily iterating away, all the while thinking 'this is great'. Not only does SCRUM seem to be working well but when there are issues even they become stimulating challenges. I think it's because the procedures and techniques that support an Agile approach simply give you the tools and techniques to get on with it.