Copyright © 2011 Seapine Software, Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Seapine is proud to be a member of the Agile Alliance. Contents Backlogs: The Foundation to Your Agile Success ................................. 2 The Art and Science of Reliable Agile Estimating ........................... 15 Mapping the Journey: Release and Sprint Planning ...........................34 Marching Along: Daily Activities ..............................................51 Automated Testing and Agile ...............................................71 Are We There Yet? Doneness Criteria .........................................83 It’s Showtime: The Sprint Review .............................................95 Look Back in Agile: The Sprint Retrospective ..................................106 Measuring Up: Progress Metrics .............................................122 Mixing Methodologies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .142 3 Welcome to the Seapine Agile Expedition! The Agile Expedition is a journey into the world of Agile. The Becoming Agile is not easy or for the faint of heart, but as you adventure starts with the product and sprint backlogs, hikes gain experience you will find that the transition is much more through running your first sprint all the way to releasing your about the journey than it is the destination. Enjoy your journey! product, and finishes on the other side with an exploration of metrics. With Seapine’s Agile Service experts guiding you, you’ll discover how Agile development can benefit your organization and customers. Once you reach the end of the book, you may find that you’re really at the beginning of your Agile journey. 1 2 What is the Product Backlog? An organized and categorized product backlog is the foundation of delivering what your customer needs. The product backlog is used to prioritize customer requests and ensure the team is working on the most important features for your business. Agile practices work because they deliver value to the customer in increments, and give customers the opportunity to offer relevant feedback at defined intervals throughout the development cycle. An outdated backlog may cause your team to spend effort on features that are no longer the best value for the business. Worse yet, if the product backlog does not contain enough features to keep the development team busy, they may sit idle until new features are added. However, this scenario can generally be mitigated 3 by having the team work through technical debt. Getting Started Before your team starts delivering features, the Product If you’re working on an existing product, building the initial Owner must first build a product backlog for the product or backlog may be more complex. For example, a large legacy project. If you’re starting a project from scratch, this process is application may have thousands of feature requests, bugs, straightforward. The Product Owner meets with the customer and other tasks that have been cataloged over the years. The and end users to discuss what critical problems the project will problem isn’t filling the product backlog; it’s deciding which solve or challenges the customer is hoping to overcome with items are the most important for the team to work on next. this product. Depending on the project, the discovery process Start by adding known higher-priority features that support can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks to outline your release or sprint goals. This should give the team enough enough features for the first few sprints. to choose from for the first couple of sprints. As the project moves forward, the Product Owner will continually prune and prioritize the product backlog. 4 Add Features to the Product Backlog Three types of work items fit in the backlog: Bugs Bugs and defects are problems found by development, testing, Technical Debt and end users. In a Waterfall process, testing is typically the Over time, the direction and scope of a product usually last step of the development lifecycle and it’s quite common changes. Performance and scalability expectations change. to release code that includes defects. Bugs pile up over the New technology or best practices become available. Everyone years and should be included in the backlog and prioritized can agree that it’s a good idea to update the existing solution accordingly. to address these types of issues. In practice, however, it can be difficult for the Product Owner to prioritize them over highly visible features requested by customers. These types of backlog items are often referred to as technical debt because 5 they frequently accumulate over time. Examples of technical debt include upgrading to the latest third-party libraries, making architectural changes to support better scalability and configurability, or refactoring the source code for easier maintainability in the future. These tasks need to be included in the product backlog and prioritized along with defects so they have visibility in the planning cycle. New Features Feature requests come from a variety of sources, including end users, sales, support, and product management. They can be the hardest to prioritize as you balance the competing needs of satisfying your existing customer base, satisfying the needs of near-term sales opportunities, and working toward a longer-term vision of your product. The Product Owner must routinely monitor these sources and arbitrate potentially conflicting requests to ensure the backlog contains the features that will attract new customers and build loyalty with existing customers. 6 Organizing the Product Backlog Next, you need to classify and prioritize the product backlog. To learn about organizing backlogs with TestTrack folders It doesn’t do any good to have a backlog if you can’t quickly and custom fields, check out our Backlog Tagging Best Practices analyze it by different criteria. Classification and prioritization blog post: http://blogs.seapine.com/2010/06/backlog- are largely manual processes, but this goes faster than you tagging-best-practices. might expect. When first getting started, don’t worry about organizing your entire backlog. Find the features that are clearly high priority, mark them as high priority, and ask the development team to classify them as outlined below. Slowly expand prioritization and classification to more and more of the backlog as needed, based on your expected sprint schedule. 7