Transitioning to agile development.

Janeve George Posted On August 9, 2011

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Agile development methods has been hearing praise from lots of development teams and customers all around the world. It has become one of the best alternative process against the traditional waterfall model. There are many people who have one main question in their mind. How can we start agile development?

Transitioning to agile is not an easy task. Especially for a team that have been following the traditional approach for a long time. This requires a major shift in the mind-set in everyone involved, time investments and lots of guts and self-motivation.

Before the transition

The adoption of agile methodology starts with these preparation steps:

Understand Agile methodology
Find an agile coach
Learn from how others did it
Train and motivate the team
Choose a project to start with
Get the customer involved

Understand Agile methodology

It should all start with understanding the basic concepts, various flavors and techniques in agile methodology, advantages and potential problems. Attend agile conferences and join agile communities.A certification will help in be an added advantage.

Find an agile coach

Hire a good agile coach to train the team and give guidance in the process transitioning. An agile coach knows in and out of the agile process and has the skills to train, prepare and mentor the team for the rough road ahead.

Learn from how others did it

Talk to others in the community who went through the ups and downs in the transition. It will help in foreseeing problems and tips in making the ride an easier one.

Train and motivate the team

Agile transition is not an easy job, and the team will be going through a huge psychological shift during the process transitioning. This is majorly because success of agile process hugely depends on a self-organizing and disciplined team. A lot will be going around and the team should be well prepared for the transition. Choose team members who are enthusiastic and open to change. Train them and train them well.

Choose a project to start with

Many people think it is sensible to choose a low-risk and not so significant project for the transitioning. The problem with such a project is that even the transition will not be taken seriously. People will loose interest and the transition will die off. It will be better to choose significant project so that everyone will do everything possible to make things go right.

Get the customer involved

Customer collaboration and communication is one of the key factors of the success of the agile methodology. It is important to get the customer involved in the transition process. The customer should understand the importance of their involvement and should be willing to maintain a frequent feedback loops flowing during the project development.

Adopting Agile Development

With the team and stakeholders trained and all pumped-up are now ready to gradually migrate to agile development process. There is no silver-bullet that would solve the problems in the process. The best part of being agile is that the problems are visible and necessary steps could be taken to solve them. It is up to the team to decide what is best for the project they are developing. Agile methodology is always an evolving process. We have listed down few tips to help in adopting agile development.

Bring the team to one room

There is a very high emphasis on communication and collaboration between team members to roll-out high value products. The development method wouldn’t be agile unless this happens frequently. The best way to achieve this is by bringing the cross-functional team into one room. That means everyone who is part of the development should be able to communicate with each other. The team should include developers, testers, system admins, architects, manager, etc..

It might be difficult for people in different locations and time zones to work together and communicate and collaborate effectively.That is where VoIP / Video Conferencing and other tools project tracking tools comes to rescue. Few interesting tools to look-up are:

Continuous Integration
TDD
Bug tracking software
User stories management tools
A good coding standards
Desktop sharing
Video & voice calls
Online whiteboards
Proxy Customers

Daily stand-ups

Daily stand-ups are very important in agile since it requires people to communicate the status of the project and also find issues they are facing. It also helps in building a strong team bonding. People start proactively solving issues faced in the team which helps in reaching the common goals. Since the stand-ups are time boxed, frequent and usually scheduled at the best time of the day, team members are all ears and the stand ups doesn’t end up being one of those boring meetings.

Training and workshops

The team that is new to agile world will require frequent training and workshops during the initial period of the project. This would help sharpen their skills and understand and implement agile better. It is also a good idea to sponsor some or all the team to attend agile conferences and training sessions conducted in the nearby cities.

Stop and reassess whenever necessary

It is possible that things might go wrong during the initial phase of the adoption. If there are too many concerns cropping up, it is best to stop and reassess what is going wrong and fix them before proceeding.

Keep the stakeholders in the loop

Often in an agile newbie company gets too busy in the iterations and development that they loose the attention of the stakeholders and end up communicating lesser and lesser with them. It is very important that the stakeholders are frequently updated and made sure that there is a constant flow of feedback and new user stories.

Plan cool down after few iterations

There are lots of things happening during iteration and it is important to have cool-down iterations after every 3 or 4 iteration. Cool down iterations usually have lower priority stories or lower number of stories. These iterations would help the team to relax and refocus. You could also plan some team outing or training sessions in the cool down iterations.

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Author

Janeve George

A Technology Leader, Software Engineer, and Agile Methodologies enthusiast. Currently, working as Lead Software Development with Zeta Suite. He has more than 1.8 decades of experience spanning different verticals predominated by hosting, cloud, and media delivery technologies.

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