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My team does some development, but is mainly involved in supprting an existing suite of applications. We now have an imbedded tester (and another on the way). So how can I apply agile practises in what is a purely reactive situation?
You could try to use Kanban. It is more suited for such dynamic situations than Scrum. The ultimate solution would be to use Kanban for support activities and Scrum for development, but in case you spend much less than 50% of your time for development this may be not worthed (overengineering).
Even though it is purely reactive, you surely have larger requests that need to be prioritized? I am using Scrum in a support situation to help prioritizing the non-emergency work that often requires hours or days of effort. I think that Scrum in some ways fits in even better in a support situation than in development.
I would start with prioritizing the issues that come in (someone from the business end should be responsible for that), making things visible (e.g. getting them up on a task board), and improving your definition of done for each task (tests, code review, etc).
Now that you have a tester with the team, it would be a good time to start some TDD and definitely start automating a lot of your tests.
Once you have some of these basics in place, you can look at either Scrum or Kanban depending on your needs. If tasks always seem to come out of the blue, Kanban is probably more appropriate as another poster suggested.
In order to be successful with Kanban, you must make sure that you have a very solid definition of done to ensure that you maintain quality throughout. Without it, you won't see the full benefit.
I would also recommend scheduling regular retrospectives to see what is working for you and where you need to improve.
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What are advantages and disadvantages of Scrum over Kanban methodology.
Which one is better for mobile development?
TL;DR; You don't have an Apples to Apples comparison here.
Scrum is am empirical framework optimised for delivering Software
Kanban is an empirical method of optimising any existing process
Kanban
Kanban needs way more discipline in your team and organisation to be able to get value. You start by modelling your current processed and then make small incremental changes to the process to optimise it for your needs. Most teams fail to optimise effectively and end up where they started (or close to it) forever.
Kanban is not focused on Software Delivery and is best suited to tasks that have a relatively small standard deviation in size of batches. This allows you to monitor flow and optimise for it.
Scrum
Scrum is a Framework that enshrines accountability, inspection and adaption, and transparency as its fundamental pillars. The three clear roles provide accountability so everyone knows what they have to do. Each and every one of the Events provides a Kaizan moment to allow you to change. Every one of the Artefacts creates transparency so we all know what is going on.
The most important artefact is the Increment of Working Software because that is what out goal is. You can read the Scrum Guide to find out how it all goes together.
Scrum is focused only on Software Delivery (although modified versions like EduScrum exist) and is best suited for tasks that have a large standard deviation in batch sizes.
Conclusion
There is no 'better' option, its what works for you. I see more teams succeed quicker using Scrum than Kanban.
If you bought the board game monopoly would you expect it to come with a rule book or a strategy guide? Right, a rule book. Will the rules help you win? No, you will need to come up with, and experiment with, strategies that work for you.
The Scrum Guide is the rule book for Scrum
In Kanban you come up with your own rule book as you go along
All the practices common to either technique are complimentary.
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I'm currently confused in incremental software methodology
what is the main difference between incremental development which adopt plan driven approach and the one that adopt agile approach ?
can anyone explain to me what is the difference between those two and if my choice was good for the project?
Learning is at the core of the agile approaches. It embraces the fact that it is almost impossible to have enough information to make detailed plan up front. Instead implementing, or possibly trying to implement, your first feature will trigger very valuable learnings. Both about your implementation and the usage and actual needs in the field.
I'm not sure what "documentations are really important" actually means, but dividing implementation along module boundaries will cause a number of unwanted effects:
you can only learn about the usage of the complete system after all modules are done, a.k.a. Too late. That will drive unknown remaining amount of work after you thought you were done.
how do you know that the first module is done? Presumably based on some guesswork about what it should do, which might be right but most probably is at least slightly wrong, which causes unknown late modifications
integration problems will also show up after the third module was supposed to be finished
All three drive late realizations about problems and unknown amount of work left to the end.
Agile focuses on driving out these learnings and information by forcing early feedback, such as early integration (as soon as there is a skeleton for the three modules), user feedback by forcing implementation of one user level feature at a time with demos of them as soon as hty are ready.
It is a strategy for minimizing risks in all software endeavours.
In my mind, you should have gone for an agile aproach.
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In my agile development course, after gathering user requirements, I'm asked to write a plan (for developing an application) that is supposed to define project activities, milestones - iterations and deliverables. The plan is actually the work breakdown.
So what should the initial plan in an agile project look like? If I'm giving a plan of everything in advance (as the homework asks), isn't that the waterfall model. If each iteration in agile deals with the whole cycle of plan-do-check-act, then why do we need an initial plan?
You need an initial plan because somehow you have to decide how many people are going to work on the project and develop a budget. You can never know what your scope, time, and budget are all going to be, but generally one of these is going to be fixed. Figure out which is the most important and build a plan around that. Without this as a starting point, nobody is going to fund the project.
Build a project backlog with all of the known goals. Then pull out the biggest of the goals as key milestones. Generally, a client needs to see progress towards their desired feature set. A smart client will be prepared to adjust these as the project goes, but you can absolutely lay out a series of goals to give you targets for creating working software with each sprint.
You should read Planning Extreme Programming by Kent Beck. If you ignore the extreme part of the title you can easly adapt this to your agile methods.
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I'm sorry if this is a duplicate, but the question search terms are pretty generic.
I work at a small(ish) development firm. I say small, but the company is actually a fair size; however, I'm only the second full-time developer, as most past work has been organized around contractors.
I'm in a position to define internal project process and policy- obvious stuff like SCM and unit-testing. Methodology is outside the scope of the document I'm putting together, but I'd really like to push us in a leaner (and maybe even Agile?) direction.
I feel like I have plenty of good practice recommendations, but not enough solid motivation to make my document the spirit guide I'd like it to be. I've separated the document into "principles" and "recommendations". Recommendations have been easy to come up with. Use SCM, strive for 1-step, regularly scheduled builds, unit test first, document as you go... Listing the principles that are supposed to be informing these recommendations, though, has been rough.
I've come up with "tools work for us; we should never work for tools" and a hazy clause aimed at our QA (which has been overly manual) that I'd like to read "tedium is the root of all evil".
I don't want to miss an opportunity with this document to give us a good in-house start and maybe even push us toward Agile. What principles am I missing?
EDIT 4/15 -
I might have been ambiguous about the scope of this document. For now, it's policy that my co-dev and I plan to follow. So far, we've been given free reign on choice of local tool, source control, etc, and the general process we follow in development (eg build, deploy, whether to use continuous integration...).
Ideally, I'd also like this document to be a model on which to base further process improvements. I'm mostly thinking QA, and maybe nudging our project management towards something lighter and iterative.
The Agile Manifesto and its principles might help with a few more ideas
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Can anyone suggest a set of "commandments" to make everyone operate efficiently during a development project? I am looking for commandments on how Dev and QA and Management should interact. If you lookup Agile or Scrum development models they can explain peoples roles and how things work but it doesn't define a set of bylaws that protect peoples roles from each other.
Micromanagement shouldn't need to occur when rules work properly. QA should have all information they need to test and managment should define what a successful test is. Etc.
If such a set of rules existed and was known to work well, a large industry of consultants would disappear overnight. By the contrapositive, there are no "rules" that meet your qualifications.
All the roles are part of the same team, so everyone share the same goal. People collaborate, meet daily, communicating directly, preferably face-to-face.
Everything is based on trust, there is no need for "protection".
The relationships should all be spelled out pretty well in Agile. Of course, with Agile the point isn't to protect you from each other, it's to eliminate differences between you.
For instance, you are supposed to get rid of the concept of code ownership, if you find broken code you fix it. If you need help, pair with the original author.
QA needs representation in the core team. They don't get left behind because they are in every scrum meeting--as, of course, is the customer.
Management's role (if there is management) in agile is to stay out of the way and provide treats :)
These kind of things weren't just made up for fun, they really are important.
How about the agile manifesto?
http://agilemanifesto.org/
And the 12 priciples, which I'm sure you'll link through to:
http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
Edit
Sorry, I misunderstood the question. These are still some good principles!
Just keep communicating and addressing trouble when it comes up.
It's like in marriage: you can't prepare for every contingency beforehand -- you must be willing to deal with every setback that occurs by talking it through with your partners and finding a way to cope with it.