Today at work we had story time. My first thought was to bring a blanket in case nap time was to follow, however the stories we told were not of fantasy nor adventure, but stories of use cases. Stories of what one developer needs to do his job, as well as stories of what the customer expects from the product. Theses stories were the first step in developing a better product using AGILE. AGILE a development process for project management, has become increasingly more popular in companies due to its communicative efforts between developers and owners throughout the development of a product. Through the processes involved in AGILE such as Sprints, Scrums and story time, project owners are able to communicate with the developers every step of the way.The body behind AGILE is the backlog where stories are kept, these stories as explained before are user/ developer requests. Tasks are then assigned to each story in a manner so that they can be accomplished in a set amount of time called a Sprint. Daily standup meetings referred to as Scrums are also crucial in AGILE development. These meetings give us a chance to ask the owner/client what is most important for that day as well as give some updates. Also if anything is causing problems and blocking our progress, the scrum allows us to communicate this and brainstorm with the whole group for a solution. By constantly querying the product with vague use cases versus specific, it gives flexibility to the designers while still meeting the desired result on a schedule. All in all, AGILE constructs a solid plan to make an effective use of developers time.
I agree that communication is what makes Agile great. In a group setting communication is probably the most important factor in getting things done.
ReplyDeleteOne of the cons of Agile seems to be the lack of foresight however. Agile is great at planning the next step but not so great when it comes to planning the next three steps. This makes it so the sprints in the beginning are short but drastically get longer near the end because of a lack of foresight.
However if a group were to get passed this and learn to to not get into that road block, then Agile would be a monster of a management system.
I really love the cartoons in your post, very funny.
ReplyDeleteOne of the most important activities in software development is communication. All kinds of roles in a project need to communicate freely and clearly. Misunderstand causes the wrong definition of requirements, which in turn fails the project.
Scrum provides opportunity to product owner and other stakeholders to involve the project from beginning, which limits mistakes and reduce cost. With fast response in short sprint, people can understand each other more quickly and clearly.