AGILE PROCESS

Basic workflow of overall IT companies

If you are the one who already made your hands dirty about agile than just skip this one. If you are the one who is a starter in corporate than you can read to know about the basic terminologies in agile.

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” — Helen Keller

This quote is pretty enough to portray about the outcome of teamwork. If you see any companies where developers and testers work concurrently to get the things done,than they are following agile process.

Agile is not a step by step process unlike waterfall model.Less documentation is followed in this process.No SRS is being used instead it uses EPICS and STORIES.It is considered to be one of the fastest process.Epics is considered to be a larger requirement and Stories are considered to be a smaller requirement . Both of this defines the customer needs and it is stored in Excel.

TERMINOLOGIES USED IN AGILE:

1. TASKS - Tasks are simply the actions performed to complete the steps as mentioned in epics and stories.
2. PRODUCT OWNER-Main man who gathers the requirements from Customers/Stakeholders in a proper way and provides this requirements(in the form of EPICS and Stories) as a input to the team.They actually don’t know about the implementation of the project.But supervises the overall status of the project. Every release should satisfy the product owner. Team should again start working from the scratch to build the product once again if it is being rejected by the product owner.
3. SCRUM MASTER- They are the ones who work closely among all the teams .But does not gets involved in the actual process.
4. SCRUM TEAM- Developers and Testers are collectively referred as scrum team.

SIMPLE-OUTLINE ABOUT AGILE:

Product owner start prioritizing the stories received from the customer and say for an example 10 stories and 10 epics are prepared by him. It is shared with the team members. Required software delivery estimation time is calculated for specific story and this referred as “story point”. Total estimation period is separated into sprints. Sprints are referred as a period of 1–3 weeks where a particular piece of software product(referred as release/version in team) is handled to the customer. Both Developers and Testers starts from the scratch and start working on it based on the stories. Once the version 1 is completed, it will be reviewed by product owner and it is handled to the customer. If there were any changes mentioned by the customer in the first sprint, modifications will be added in the second sprint and handled. After the completion of all sprints,final project will be handled to the customer.

DETAILED VIEW OF AGILE PROCESS

AGILE-SCRUM-means team consists of scrum master,product owner,scrum team(QA&DEV)

Step 1: Product owner collects input from executives,stakeholders(or) customers(or)users.

Step 2: “PRODUCT BACKLOG”-The complete story of a product and is prepared by product owner. Prioritize the stories and features of the product.

Step 3:Once the product backlog is handled to the scrum team,sprint planning meeting is conducted to estimate the time required to complete the product(story point).

Step 4:“SPRINT BACKLOG”- describes the stories and epic to be finished in the particular sprint and it prepared by scrum team.

Step 5:One sprint is minimum period of 1–3 weeks and maximum of 4 weeks.

Step 6:“DAILY SCRUM MEETING”- is conducted by the scrum master to interact with the scrum team about the progress,challenges/blockers found in their work within the duration of 15 mins. What was implemented in last 24 hours and what will be going to implement in next 24 hours is being discussed here. It is conducted on daily basis.

Step 7: Once the sprint is completed final demo is given by the QA to the product owner.Upon successful completion,it should satisfy the product owner and handled to the customer version by version.

Step 8:“SPRINT RETROSPECTIVE MEETING”- After the successful completion of the entire product,this meeting is held to discuss about ‘What went well?’, ‘What went wrong?’, ‘What are the areas needed to be improved?’ . Eventually,this meeting will make the team to perform more for the further projects.

ADVANTAGES OF AGILE SCRUM:

1. There is no need for the customer to wait for the entire software.After receiving the sprint there will be a chance to include the changes felt by the customer in the upcoming sprints.
2. Frequent release of software.
3. It is considered to be very useful in customer point of view.
4. Saves lots of quality time and less cost.

As a starter, its good to learn about the “JIRA”- A tool to automate the process involved in agile.