Tuesday, 23 September 2014

Which Agile Technique or Tool would be the right fit for software development Projects?

A change in outlook is required in Agile methodologies as compared to other traditional approaches. The fundamental focus in Agile is to achieve maximum business value as compared to the scope in Waterfall methods. In Agile, quality and constraints can be changed to realize the main objective of accomplishing maximum business value  while in Waterfall, cost and schedule are altered to ensure the desired scope is achieved.
The Waterfall model will fit for well-organized and foreseeable projects wherein accurate estimation and well demarcated project requirements are prevalent. However, these types of projects are on the decline in many organizations and industries. Why the decline? Shifting requirements from customers’ impacted businesses to urgently adapt and contemplate objectively the pros and cons of their delivery methods.
In software development projects, Agile techniques and tools matter a lot – in choosing those tools which would be a perfect fit in consonance with their project features and requirements, vision and mission statements, organizational culture and structure.
Kanban accentuates just-in-time (JIT) delivery and strive to prevent overburdening developers. The pull principle is made use of by Kanban in the creation of task queues. The tasks are exhibited using visual aids. On the basis of availability of capacity, the developers pull tasks from the queue. Kanban as a visual management process and the Kanban method, which can be defined as incremental evolutionary process management are the two broad types of Kanban.
Lean Kanban is a set of values and principles summary on how to get success with product development. Whereas, Kanban is a process tool through which these values and principles are put into practice.
Scrum’s adaptability to change that form its core principle benefits intricate projects with uncertainty of a higher magnitude wherein undertaking long-term projections and estimations would definitely entail high risk. Scrum works best for projects wherein project requirements in the longer run are almost uncertain, the projects get impacted by the rapidly fluctuating market dynamics, and where teams would be expected of to have more flexibility.
The prime focus of Crystal family of methodologies toward efficiency, osmotic communication between team members and feedback-based learning for future operations can be adopted by teams if it suits their requirements pertaining to the project.
Extreme Programming is an Agile practice premeditated to improve software quality and responsiveness as per changing customer wants. It is characterized by a flat management structure. It has a few definitive features such as pair programming, unit testing of all code, and frequent communication with customers and programmers.
There is no magic rule that a team needs to use a particular Agile tool ‘only’ as that would depend on the project features and requirements, and how they are going to manage it.

To know more click on: http://www.scrumstudy.com/blog/which-agile-technique-or-tool-would-be-the-right-fit-for-software-development-projects/

Thursday, 4 September 2014

Best Methodologies in SCRUM

SCRUM is a considered to be set of guidelines that oversee the growth process of a product, from its design phase to its completion. Scrum is one among several agile methods that practices an iterative and incremental procedure in the course of development of a project.
As per SCRUM, a project is divided into what is known as sprint or iteration. Each sprint is timeboxed usually between 2 weeks to a maximum of a month. After a sprint, the team meets and reviews the progress of the project. Here team tries to identify the problems encountered during the sprint and formulates the objectives for the next sprint. In the course of every sprint the team analyses and works on user requirements (also known as user stories) in order to confirm that after every sprint, user needs are taken into consideration and are being satisfied.
One important aspect of SCRUM to note is that it depends on self-organisation. Self-organisation helps the team to achieve the goal by following the most resourceful path with the available resources, knowledge, skills and abilities. This allows team to experiment with different approaches, to analyse and to learn from their failures and to improve.
In a self-organised team, there is no one elected as team leader. The teams work cross-functionally and the team is responsible as a whole in decision making.
SCRUM has been successfully engaged in many companies in many different fields and has achieved outstanding results.
Listed below are few of methodologies used in SCRUM:
Burn down charts : This chart is used to track the progress achieved during the course of the project against the release plan using a release burndown chart. This chart is updated at the end of each sprint by the ScrumMaster.

Stand up meeting: The team meets every day for a swift status update. The meeting is usually time boxed for 15 minutes.
In this meeting everyone tries to answer the three questions
  •                         What did you do yesterday
  •                         What are you going to do today?
  •                          What are the challenges you are facing?

Product backlog : It is prioritized list of all the desired changes to the product being developed which is done by the Product Owner.
  • This is used to record requests for modifying a product.  This is used to add new features, changing old features, removing features and fixing issues.
To know more click on : http://www.scrumstudy.com/blog/best-methodologies-in-scrum/