Agile and 3 most important portions of the agile process

While agile is a general philosophy regarding software production, scrum is an implementation of that philosophy pertaining specifically to project management. So agile scrum defines a set of recommendations that the whole team should follow. There are 3 main portions in the agile process that we need to concentrate on when applying agile into project management in real life.

1. The scrum master is no. 1 role in an agile process.

Besides the product owner who is responsible for defining the users' stories, and maintaining the whole product backlog, scrum master is the most important roles in the agile process. This person has to be a bridge of communication between the product owner and the rest of the implementation team.

Scrum Master is most important in an Agile process

Because of the important role, scrum master should be a person who possesses a strong technical knowledge with good communication skills, and proactively participates in all development processes. In short, it is a hard role that requires many skills. In addition, any modification about users' stories and product backlog from the product owner must be completed through the scrum master.









2. Planning board is the backbone of an agile process.

Currently, the planning board now accommodates the Lean Development Process that we use in agile today. The benefit of the planning board is to help adapting any changes throughout the process.

There are four main columns must be present in the board:

• Release backlog – it shows all the current release after each sprint or all what we have archived.
• Sprint backlog – in each sprint, it shows what product owner wants to be done. Any undone from previous sprint will keep showing in the sprint backlog, and yet moving to the release backlog when they are done.
• Working on – work divided mostly is listed here for teamwork control. The whole team will know what they and other members are working on.
• Done – all completed stories will be here. However, all bugs and changes from the sprint backlog also need to list here.

3. Continuous Improvement Model helps push up performance.

After a few sprints, the scrum master needs to gather the whole team to discuss any good and bad things has happened in the team. This is very important to improve the team performance. At first, it might not be comfortable to talk about what really go wrong in the team, yet it will give big awareness for the whole process. In retrospectives meeting, all team members need to give their open opinions about what are happening in the team.

• Bad things – like fighting between team members, not collaborating in pair work, or spending too much time on minor things. Solutions to these problems should be given immediately to help avoiding  them in the future.
• Good things – like finishing on time, giving the best suggestions and ideas. It is also important to list all the good things because it encourages the team to do it more and more.

The adaption of the agile process may be different for each time and each team. However, we can embrace the whole process by concentrating on 3 important portions of the process above. We should never follow blindly the rules because adaption to the changes is more important.


References:
1. SCRUM: The Story of an Agile Team
http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/editorials/scrum-the-story-of-an-agile-team/

2. Agile Development
http://www.versionone.com/agile101/agile_development.asp