Day 3 of Agile in 3 Days
Ravindranath Porandla
Being Agile in 3 Days: Your Guide to Building Awesome Stuff!
Day 3: Mastering Agile Tools & Advanced Concepts – Staying Smart, Staying Agile! 📊🚀
Hello, Agile champions! You've made it to Day 3! Over the past two days, we've explored the core philosophy of Agile, understood its values and principles, and learned how quality is built in at every step for our Smart Home Control App. You now know the rhythm of Sprints and the importance of feedback.
Today, we're going to dive into the practical side: the cool tools Agile teams use, how they measure their success, and some more advanced concepts that help scale Agile to even bigger projects. Get ready to wrap up your Agile journey with some powerful insights! 💡🏡📈
Chapter 1: Burn-Up & Burn-Down Charts – Our Smart Home App's Progress Trackers! 📈
Imagine you're developing our Smart Home App. How do you know how much progress you've made, and how much is left to do? Agile teams use special charts for this, called Burn-Up and Burn-Down Charts! They're simple yet powerful visual tools to see progress at a glance.
Burn-Up Chart (How Much We've Done!):
What it is: This chart displays the amount of work that has been completed over time, along with the total scope of work for a Sprint or the entire project.
How it works for our app: Imagine a graph. The horizontal axis is time (days or Sprints). The vertical axis is the amount of work (e.g., Story Points completed). You'll see a line climbing upwards, showing the "burned up" (completed) work for our Smart Home App features. Often, there's a second line showing the total scope – if that line also goes up, it means new features are being added to the overall project (scope creep!), which the team needs to be aware of.
Why it's useful: It visually shows our team's progress towards a goal and helps identify if the total amount of work is changing.
Burn-Down Chart (How Much is Left!):
What it is: This chart represents the amount of work that remains to be completed in the project or Sprint.
How it works for our app: On a graph, the horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis is remaining work (e.g., Story Points or hours). You'll see a line starting high and ideally "burning down" towards zero by the end of the Sprint or project.
Why it's useful: It makes the team's progress visible, showing the rate at which work is being completed and how much is left. It's a great daily reminder of the target!
Different Types of Burn-Down Charts:
These charts can show different levels of detail for our Smart Home App:
Product Burndown Chart: Shows the Story Points completed across all Sprints for the entire Smart Home App. It depicts the completion of requirements over time, indicating how much of the app's overall vision has been achieved.
Sprint Burndown Chart: This is specifically for a single Sprint. It shows the remaining work for our Smart Home App team for that particular 2-week Sprint. It makes the team's daily work visible and highlights if they're on track to finish their Sprint goals.
Release Burndown Chart: If our Smart Home App has multiple Sprints leading up to a major release (e.g., "Version 1.0 with Lights and Thermostat"), this chart tracks the team's progress against the total work planned for that entire release. It's updated at the end of each Sprint and is essential for seeing overall progress.
Defect Burndown Chart: This tracks the total number of bugs or defects identified in the Smart Home App and, more importantly, how many have been fixed or removed over time. It's crucial for monitoring quality improvements.
Chapter 2: Planning Poker – Smart Home App Estimation Made Fun! 🃏
How do teams guess how long something (like building a new feature for our Smart Home App) will take without managers just telling them? They play Planning Poker!
What it is: Also known as Scrum Poker, it's a consensus-based, game-like technique that helps Agile teams collectively estimate the effort required to complete each item on their Product Backlog (especially User Stories). It often uses cards with a modified Fibonacci sequence (like 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100).
How it works for our app:
The Product Owner explains a User Story for our Smart Home App (e.g., "As a user, I want to dim the lights to a specific percentage using a slider.").
The Development Team discusses it, asks questions, and makes sure everyone understands.
Each team member secretly chooses a card representing their estimate (in Story Points) of the effort.
Everyone reveals their cards at the same time.
If there's a big difference in estimates (e.g., someone picks 3 and someone else picks 20), the high and low estimators explain their reasons. This often uncovers hidden complexities or misunderstandings.
The team discusses and plays another round until they reach a good agreement (a "consensus").
Why it's cool: It makes estimating fun and collaborative, gets everyone's opinion, and helps identify issues or missed details before starting work on a User Story. It avoids one dominant person influencing the estimate and encourages independent thinking.
Chapter 3: Agile Metrics – Measuring Our Smart Home App's Awesomeness! 📊
Just like a sports team tracks stats to improve, Agile teams use metrics (measurements) to see how well they're doing. These metrics aren't just about speed; they're about the quality of our Smart Home App, the team's productivity, overall progress, team health, and most importantly, the value delivered to our users.
Here are some standard metrics for an Agile project like our Smart Home App:
Velocity: (We learned this yesterday!) This measures the amount of work (in Story Points) our Smart Home App development team successfully completes during a Sprint. It provides an idea of the team's capacity and helps predict how much work they can do in future Sprints and roughly how long it might take to finish a project. It's a calibration tool for efficient timelines and helps identify improvements over time.
Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD): This is a flow diagram that visually tracks the current status of work-in-progress for our Smart Home App. It shows how many features are in "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done" states over time. It helps to track the flow stability of the team and identify bottlenecks in the development process.
Defect Removal Awareness: This measures the ability of our development team to identify and remove bugs or defects in the Smart Home App before it's released to users. A high awareness indicates strong quality control and helps maintain product quality.
Work Category Allocation: This metric tracks where our team is spending its time (e.g., on new features for light control, fixing bugs in thermostat integration, research for coffee maker connection). It helps us understand where our investment of time is going so we can adjust priorities if needed.
Sprint Burndown Metric: This is essentially the data behind our Sprint Burn-Down Chart, tracking the total number of tasks or Story Points completed within a Sprint compared to the estimated work. It tracks daily progress within a Sprint.
Defect Resolution Time: This measures the average time it takes our Smart Home App team to identify, diagnose, and fix a bug once it's reported. Shorter resolution times indicate an efficient bug-fixing process.
Time Coverage or Code Coverage (Test Coverage): This metric measures the percentage of our Smart Home App's code that is being "covered" or executed by automated tests during testing. High code coverage helps assess test performance and ensures more of the code is checked for defects.
Business Value Delivered: This is a crucial metric that measures the actual impact and efficiency of the working team on business goals. For our Smart Home App, did the new feature increase user engagement? Did it lead to more downloads? This focuses on the outcome, not just the output.
Chapter 4: Important Tools for Scrum Projects! 💻
While Agile emphasizes people over tools, good software can certainly help! To manage our Smart Home App's backlog, track progress, and facilitate communication, Agile (especially Scrum) teams use various online tools. Some of the most popular include:
Atlassian Jira: A very widely used, powerful tool for issue tracking, project management, and Agile development, perfect for managing our Product Backlog, Sprints, and bug tracking.
Trello: A simple, visual Kanban-style tool often used for task management and team collaboration.
Azure DevOps: A comprehensive suite of Microsoft tools that includes Agile planning, source control, testing, and release management features.
Asana / Monday.com: Versatile project management platforms that can be configured to support Agile methodologies.
VersionOne (now part of CollabNet VersionOne): A long-standing enterprise Agile management platform.
Sprintster / RTC Jazz / Rally Software (now Broadcom Rally): Other dedicated Agile project management and collaboration tools.
Chapter 5: Timeboxing & Impeding Our Smart Home App's Progress! ⏱️🚧
Timeboxing: Keeping Our App Development Focused!
What it is: This is a core time management technique in Agile. Timeboxing means setting a fixed, maximum amount of time for an activity or a meeting. When the time is up, the activity ends, regardless of whether it's totally "finished."
How it works for our app:
The entire Sprint (e.g., 2 weeks) is a timebox – it cannot be extended.
Sprint Planning is timeboxed (e.g., 4 hours for a 2-week Sprint).
The Daily Scrum (stand-up) is timeboxed (max 15 minutes).
Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective are also timeboxed.
Why it's important: Timeboxing helps improve focus, prevents activities from dragging on, and significantly increases productivity. It forces decisions and ensures continuous flow.
Impediments: Roadblocks to Our App's Success!
What they are: An Impediment is anything that blocks or stops the progress of the team working on our Smart Home App. It's like a roadblock on our development journey!
Examples for our app:
Missing resource: The team needs a special smart bulb for testing, but it hasn't arrived.
Technical issue: A critical part of the app's code is constantly crashing, and no one knows why.
Operational issue: The team's development server goes down.
External issues: A company-wide internet outage, or even more broadly, something like a major policy change that affects smart home device access.
Lack of understanding: The team isn't clear on a specific user requirement for the thermostat control.
Team dynamics: A team member is consistently negative or uncooperative, slowing others down.
Who fixes them: It is primarily the Scrum Master's responsibility to identify, bring attention to, and work to remove or resolve these impediments, ensuring the team can perform their tasks effectively and on time, thereby maintaining our app's velocity.
Chapter 6: Sashimi & Scrum of Scrums – Advanced Agile Coordination! 🍣🤝
Sashimi: The "Truly Done" Check for Our App!
What it is: "Sashimi" is a Japanese word meaning "pierced body." In Scrum, it's used as a powerful metaphor to describe something being truly, completely done. It means every single phase of the software development cycle for a particular feature has been completed.
How it applies to our app: When the "turn lights on/off" feature is Sashimi-done, it means:
Requirements were analyzed and understood.
It was planned and designed.
It was fully coded.
It was thoroughly tested (functional, performance, security, etc.).
Any necessary documentation (like user guides or API docs) is complete.
It's deployed and ready for users.
Why it's important: It's a reminder that "done" doesn't just mean "coded." It means "ready for the user and completely finished in every way," ensuring high quality and no hidden surprises.
Scrum of Scrums (SoS): Coordinating Multiple Smart Home App Teams!
What it is: Imagine our Smart Home App gets so big that we need multiple Scrum teams working on it. One team handles "Lighting Control," another handles "Thermostat Integration," and a third works on "Device Discovery." A Scrum of Scrums (SoS) is an Agile technique that involves a meeting where representatives (often the Scrum Master or a designated team member) from each of these individual Scrum teams meet.
How it works for our app: In this meeting, these representatives share high-level updates: "What has my team done since our last SoS meeting?" "What will my team do before the next one?" "Are there any impediments stopping us that another team might help with, or that impact another team?" (e.g., if the Lighting Team needs the Thermostat Team to finish a shared component).
Why it's useful: Its main purpose is to ensure coordination and integration of output from multiple teams working on the same complex Smart Home App solution. It identifies and helps eliminate dependencies and impediments that span across different teams, ensuring everyone is aligned on the overall project goals.
Day 3 Wrap-up! 🎉
You've done it! You've successfully completed your "Being Agile in 3 Days" journey! From the core philosophy and values on Day 1, to mastering quality and principles on Day 2, and finally exploring powerful tools, metrics, and advanced coordination techniques on Day 3, you now have a solid understanding of what it means to be Agile.
You're equipped with the knowledge to understand how teams build flexible, high-quality products like our Smart Home Control App, adapting to change and continuously delivering value to users. The world of Agile is vast and ever-evolving, but you've learned its fundamentals.
Keep exploring, keep learning, and keep being Agile in everything you do! Happy building! 🚀🏡✨
Subscribe to my newsletter
Read articles from Ravindranath Porandla directly inside your inbox. Subscribe to the newsletter, and don't miss out.
Written by