Agile Project

I think it was worth it to start blogging about Agile adoption at my company. Maybe one year from now, I can become an Agile consultant. :)


Product Backlog/User Stories:
1. Agile members can understand the agile benefits, practices and values. (7 points)

2. Agile members can provide feedbacks, concerns and receive further explanations. (1 point)

3. Agile members can have a room (called war room) to work on agile planning, review and estimation. (3 points)

4. Agile members can record and track user stories, projects, iterations, tasks. (3 points)

5. Agile members can understand their roles and what are expected of them. (5 points)

6. Deployment to QA is automated. (7 points)

7. Some testings are automated. (13 points)

8. Developers can start to develop unit testing code (8 points)


Sprint / Iteration 1 (Week 1-2) :
Story 1 & 2

Sprint /Iteration 2 (Week 3-4) :
Story 3 , 4 & 5

Sprint /Iteration 3 (Week 5-6) :
Story6


NOTES:

1. My velocity is 7-10 story points per weeks . So I can manage story 3, 4 and 5 in the second iteration.

2. As there is only one pig (me), there will be no daily scrum meeting. Seems like I am the product owner and scrum master for this project also. :)

3. After Sprint 2, we can actually start small pilot on small project (release Agile 1.0 to let users use the "product") .

4. We already have some new project requirements for some projects (small projects) and hope we can do Agile asap - think big, start small

5. We can make a small releases after each sprint or after multiple sprints. (release planning).

Challenges & Lesson Learnt:
1. It is hard to put in new resources to help out in between the sprints as it changes the velocity and the man hours per week. This make it hard to estimate and see whether we are on track.

2. Need to break user stories/product backlogs into small stories that can easily fit into one sprint/iteration.

3. It is hard to estimate the story points at the beginning. Usually, require to roughly know what tasks in the story to give a better estimate on the story points.

4. It is better to try to complete the users stories at each sprint, rather than do a little bit of each stories in each sprint, but in the end achieve nothing much.
For e.g., I would like to Design the "Deployment to QA" flow (Story #6) in Sprint 2 first and move "Brief agile members on how to use the Agile tool" (Story #4) to Sprint 3. But it becomes apparent that I can have more focus and can reap the benefit faster if I can finish the user stories in one sprint. It is not good to do a little bit of each stories and not closing it off asap.

Let us all commit to Change and Excellence!