Agileista

Every project has largely silent stakeholders who do not actively input into the project but do monitor its progress. These may be the stakeholders who finance the project or the may simply be senior management. By using Agile techniques you can get these people on board by providing them transparency and visibility.

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 -