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When a large system developed by Agile process requires a sudden large-scale change that affects most everything, what is the best way to go about it using Agile? Does the iterative part change at this point?
For example, what if a decision is made to make a centralized system a distributed one? Or choose another large pervasive example.
Arguably large changes should have been planned for, but it's never a perfect world which is one of the reasons Agile exists, so assume that suddenly a major change is introduced that shakes the foundation.
Edit to summarize solutions:
It's incremental all the way no matter how large or small the change may be.
"Does the iterative part change at this point?"
Never.
No matter how "pervasive" the change appears to be, you still have to work incrementally, in iterations you can manage.
You still have to prioritize the changes and make them in a way that will continue to pass unit tests and can be released when needed.
You may, for example, find that fixing 80% of the system is sufficient, and you may release. Or may be required to fix 100% of the system before releasing.
You still work incrementally. In sprints. Irrespective of when you release.
Agile has no magic answers.
There's a number of approaches :-
Plot a path of reasonably incremental changes to change the system from one archtecture to another. If you have reasonably well factored code, you should be ditching the code that is made redundant by the change and keeping stuff thats independent of the change.
Another approach if things are really different, start a parallel development of components for the new system.
Or, start new and steal as much as you can from the old project.
Depends how BIG the change really is.
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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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We're trying to implement some agile/lean practices in our software development, and one thing I've read is not to maintain a long "wish list", but to keep the product backlog as short as possible with detailed notes only about the things near the top of the list. I can clearly understand the reasoning behind this.
However, often we will have a case where a customer of a tester finds an obscure problem or edge case. We usually do some investigation to find the exact source of the problem so we know how serious it might be (e.g. could it affect other cases?) and often consider how we would solve it and/or what workarounds are available. In some cases we don't go through with the actual fix because we think the cost/benefit isn't worth it at the time, but I still want to record the results of our investigations so that if the problem happens again in future, it's easy to recognize it and see what workarounds we used, and because we might decide that it's worth fixing it after all
At the moment we create a jira ticket with a special category called "wish list" for anything like this. Is there are more "agile" approach we should be using?
Be ruthless with your jira's, there is nothing to be gained by documenting every issue you find. Remember the agile manifesto - "Working software over documentation".
Fix the blockers right away, put the critical ones in the backlog and schedule in the next sprint, for anything that isn't worth fixing, do the investigation (always investigate bugs), write a few quick notes, and close it with the jira status 'wont fix'.
In Jira, or whatever tool you use, it is common Agile practice to close such a ticket with a closure reason of "rejected" or "answered". This will maintain the minimal documentation to prove that the issue was investigated but also communicate that the cost-benefit of pursuing the issue any further was not worth it. This backlogs then should be considered completed in any reporting roll-up and shouldn't distract the team during future backlog grooming or planning sessions.
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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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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.