Agile Methodology: A Complete Guide for Beginners

Agile methodology is a software development approach that emphasizes iterative progress, collaboration, and flexibility. By delivering software incrementally, Agile allows teams to respond quickly to changing business needs. Unlike traditional methods that rely on single-pass development spanning 6 to 18 months, Agile ensures that a workable product is delivered within iterations of 1 to 4 weeks, enabling frequent feedback and continuous improvement.

Roles in Agile

➡️ Scrum Master

A Scrum Master is a team leader and facilitator who helps team members follow agile practices to meet their commitments. The responsibilities of a scrum master are as follows:

🔵 To enable close cooperation between all roles and functions.
🔵 To remove any blocks.
🔵 To shield the team from any disturbances.
🔵 To work with the organization to track the progress and processes of the company.
🔵 To ensure that Agile Inspect & Adapt processes are leveraged properly which includes:

• Daily stand-ups
• Planned meetings
• Demo
• Review
• Retrospective Meetings
• To facilitate team meetings and decision-making process

➡️ Product Owner

A Product Owner is the one who drives the product from a business perspective. The responsibilities of a Product Owner are as follows:

🔵 To define the requirements and prioritize their values.
🔵 To determine the release date and contents.
🔵 To take an active role in iteration planning and release planning meetings.
🔵 To ensure that the team is working on the most valued requirement.
🔵 To represent the voice of the customer.
🔵 To accept the user stories that meet the definition of done and defined acceptance criteria.

➡️ Cross-functional Team

Every agile team should be a self-sufficient team with 5 to 9 team members and an average experience ranging from 6 to 10 years. Typically, an agile team comprises 3 to 4 developers, 1 tester, 1 technical lead, 1 product owner, and 1 scrum master.

The product owner and scrum master are considered to be a part of the team interface, whereas other members are part of the technical interface.

How an Agile Team Plans its Work?

An Agile team works in iterations to deliver user stories where each iteration is 10 to 15 days. Each user story is planned based on its backlog prioritization and size. The team uses its capacity − how many hours are available with the team to work on tasks − to decide how much scope they have to plan.

• Point
  A Point defines how much a team can commit. A point usually refers to 8 hours. Each story is estimated in points.
• Capacity
  Capacity defines how much an individual can commit. Capacity is estimated in hours.

What is a User Story?

A user story is a requirement that defines what is required by the user as functionality. A user story can be in two forms:

• As a <User Role> I want <Functionality> so that <Business Value>
• In order to <Business value> as a <User Role> I want <Functionality>

During release planning, a rough estimate is given to a user story using relative scale as points. During iteration planning, the story is broken down into tasks.

Relationship of User Stories and Tasks

• The user story talks about what is to be done. It defines what a user needs
• The task talks about how it is to be done. It defines how a functionality is to be implemented
• Stories are implemented by tasks. Each story is a collection of tasks
• The user story is divided into tasks when it is planned in the current iteration
• Tasks are estimated in hours, typically from 2 to 12 hours
• Stories are validated using acceptance tests

When a Story is Done?

The team decides what done means. The criteria may be:

• All tasks (development, testing) are completed
• All acceptance tests are running and are passed
• No defect is open
• The product owner has accepted the story
• Deliverable to the end-user

What are the Acceptance Criteria?

Criteria define the functionality, behavior, and performance required by a feature so that the product owner can accept it. It defines what is to be done so that the developer knows when a user story is complete.

How the Requirements are Defined?

Requirements are defined as:

• A user story
• With acceptance criteria
• Tasks to implement the story

Twelve Principles of Agile Manifesto

• Customer Satisfaction: The highest priority is given to satisfy the requirements of customers through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• Welcome Change: Changes are inevitable during software development. Ever-changing requirements should be welcome, even late in the development phase. Agile processes should work to increase customers’ competitive advantage.
• Deliver a Working Software: Deliver a working software frequently, ranging from a few weeks to a few months, considering a shorter time scale.
• Collaboration: Business people and developers must work together during the entire life of a project.
• Motivation: Projects should be built around motivated individuals. Provide an environment to support individual team members and trust them to make them feel responsible for getting the job done.
• Face-to-face Conversation: Face-to-face conversation is the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team.
• Measure the Progress as per the Working Software: Working software is the key and it should be the primary measure of progress.
• Maintain Constant Pace: Agile processes aim towards sustainable development. The business, the developers, and the users should be able to maintain a constant pace with the project.
• Monitoring: Pay regular attention to technical excellence and good design to enhance agility.
• Simplicity: Keep things simple and use simple terms to measure the work that is not completed.
• Self-organized Teams: An agile team should be self-organized and should not depend heavily on other teams because the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organized teams.
• Review the Work Regularly: Review the work done at regular intervals so that the team can reflect on how to become more effective and adjust its behavior accordingly.

Agile Daily Stand-up

Daily stand-up, as the name suggests, is a daily status meeting among all the members of an agile team. It not only provides a forum for regular updates but also brings the problems of team members into focus so that they can be quickly addressed. The daily stand-up is a must-do practice, no matter how an agile team is established regardless of its office location.

What is Daily Stand-up?

🔵 A daily stand-up is a daily status meeting among all team members and it is held roughly for 15 minutes.

🔵 Every member has to answer three important questions −

•  What I did yesterday?
• What I’ll do today?
• Any impediment I am facing…/ I am blocked due to…

🔵 Daily stand-up is for status updates, not for any discussion. For discussion, team members should schedule another meeting at a different time.

🔵 Participants usually stand instead of sitting so that the meeting gets over quickly.

Why Stand-up is Important?

The benefits of having a daily stand-up in Agile are as follows:

• The team can evaluate the progress daily and see if they can deliver as per the iteration plan.
• Each team member informs all about his/ her commitments for the day.
• It provides visibility to the team on any delays or obstacles.

Who Attends a Stand-up?

• The scrum master, the product owner, and the delivery team should attend the stand-up daily.
• Stakeholders and Customers are encouraged to attend the meeting and they can act as an observers, but they are not supposed to participate in stand-ups.
• It is the scrum master’s responsibility to take note of each team member’s queries and the problems they are facing.

Agile Definition of Done

The definition of done for User Story, Iteration, and Release is given below:

User Story

A user story is a requirement that is formulated in a few sentences in the everyday language of a user and it should be completed within an iteration. A user story is done when:

• All the related codes have been checked in
• All the unit test cases have been passed
• All the acceptance test cases have been passed
• Help text is written
• The product Owner has accepted the story

Iteration

An iteration is a time-boxed collection of user stories/defects to be worked upon and accepted within the release of a product. Iterations are defined during iteration planning meetings and completed with an iteration demo and review meeting. An iteration is also termed as a sprint. An iteration is done when:

• Product backup is complete
• Performance has been tested
• User stories have been accepted or moved to the next iteration
• Defects have been fixed or postponed to the next iteration

Release

A release is a major milestone that represents an internal or external delivery of a working, tested version of the product/system. A release is done when:

• The system is stress tested
• Performance is tuned
• Security validations are carried out
• A disaster recovery plan is tested

Agile Product Backlog

The agile product backlog in Scrum is a list of prioritized features. It contains a short description of all the functionalities desired in the product. In the usual scenario, items should be broken down into user stories. Commonly, a Scrum team and its product owner write everything that they can think of for agile backlog prioritization.

Why Product Backlog is Important?

• The backlog is prepared to provide an estimate of each feature
• It helps in the planning of the product’s roadmap
• It helps in re-ranking the features of the product by adding more value to it
• It assists in determining the priority of the product first. The team member works first on the higher-priority product

Characteristics of Product Backlog

• Each product should have its product backlog. It can be a set of large to very large features.
• Multiple team members can work on a single product backlog.
• Ranking of products is based on the technical value, business value, risk management, or strategic fitness.

The Product Backlog comprises the following different types of items:

• Features
• Bugs
• Technical work
• Knowledge acquisition

Agile Tools

In Agile development, managing projects isn’t easy. Balancing daily scrums and upcoming sprints can be challenging. Agile tools streamline the process and handle tasks for you. Here are a few top options:

• JIRA Agile
• ClickUp
• Github