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[DRAFT] A Guided Approach for Agile Development Teams
The purpose of the this wiki is not to recreate the many good sources of documentation on the various aspects of Agile development. Rather it is meant to answer the many questions that a new Agile Development team will have as the make the transition from doing traditional waterfall projects over to an agile approach.
Team self assessment questions
Frequently Ask Questions Background Material
There's lots to read. Here's a few good places to start
| Name | Purpose | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Service Design | Service Design Playbook, Phases, Methods and Tools | BC Government - GCPE |
| 18f | deliver efficient, easy-to-use digital services | US Government |
| NRS SDLC Standards | Traditional SDLC Standards | BC Government - CSNR |
| 18 Criteria for digital services | A digital service standard | UK Government |
| Operational Agile Guides | best practice for delivering government services in an agile way | UK Government |
| Innovators Toolkit | An Open Source Project for Digital Service teams | BC Government - DevExchange |
| The Lean Startup | learn more quickly what works, and discard what doesn't | theleanstartup.com |
| SAFe | Scaled Agile Framework | Scaled Agile Inc. |
| DAD | Disciplined Agile Delivery - A process decision framework | www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com |
| LeSS | A framework for how to scale Scrum | The LeSS Company B.V. |
| Agile Lifecycle | How the Agile Manifesto, Test-Driven Design (TDD), database refactoring, and agile change management all fit together | Scott W. Ambler |
Features of this Guide This guide intends to provide the following functionality:
| Function | Description |
|---|---|
| Project Context | Give context to your development team for how you are implementing agile for your project |
| Toolkit | There are tools that can be used to produce better project outcomes. Learning how, when, where and why to use them will help your team mature and be successful. |
| Maturity Assessment of the organization and the product team | |
| Find advice on where in the development of your product you may benefit from the use of a methodology | |
| Identify the purposes for using the various activities in a methodology and what you can achieve or produce from it | |
| Visualize the link between methodologies (e.g. Service Design, Behavioural Insights, Lean Startup, Scrum, Roadmapping) and the various phases of the agile development life cycle | |
| Make sure you are using processes that are leading you to successful goals (Match the right operational method for how to best achieve a desired outcome) i.e. do things that work | |
| Process | While there is value in a flexible process, teams should have access to best practice information or successful project examples that can help them decide what to do first |
| Describe the sequence of activities in agile product development | |
| Suggest templates, tools, processes, and standards that can support the production of valuable working code | |
| Demonstrate the alignment of various artefacts to the outcome required by the project |
This guide should support your efforts to:
- Improve the maturity of your team in Continuous Service Improvement
- Speed up the time for on-boarding new team members
- Enable the team to achieve the desired the level of discipline
- Make transparent the approach for implementing Agile Development projects
- Support the hypothesis and experimentation to evolve the approach for implementing your agile project
For the Organization as well as the Product team. Separate assessment of the maturity will help.
| Level | 3 Advanced | 2 Mature | 1 Evolving | 0 Basic | -1 :( |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backlog | |||||
| User Focus | |||||
| Transparency | |||||
| Inspection | |||||
| Adaptation | |||||
| Culture | |||||
| DevOps | |||||
| Planning | |||||
| Review | |||||
| Lean |
To research the user journey towards a given outcome, examining both digital and non-digital touch points.
Please review to the BC Government Service Design website: <www.gov.bc.ca/servicedesign/>
Outputs from these activities may be used to work on a digital service or do a Lean start-up.
There are trained staff who can assist in conduct specific behavioural research to identify opportunities to improve services through various behavioural modification techniques and monitor the improvements.
Use this activity as a guide for lean product design, definition of success metrics, conduct the first few iterations of your product development, and determine the "go/no-go" exit points.
- Value Stream Map,
- User Research
- Business Design
- Value Proposition
- Behavioural Insights Findings
- Continuous Improvement Target (nudges)
- Metrics for measuring success
- Analytics
- Scrum Team Building
- Scrum Sprints
- Produce an MVP / Highest Value Delivery
- Plan your releases / epics
- Events the allow you to pivot and refocus
- Decide early to stop building the wrong thing
To define the business opportunity and quickly produce something of value
- 5S Plan,
- Paper or digital mockups
- User Stories
- Journey Map
- Personas
- Research Plan
- Scrum Ceremonies
- Product Backlog
- Issue Tracker
- Project Principles
- Product Roadmap
Purpose:
- Garnering project support
- Project funding
- Form the Agile team
Purpose: Artefacts:
- Establish Team Collaboration channels (e.g. Slack channel on https://devopspathfinder.gov.bc.ca)
- Set up Documentation Repository (e.g. Public: Github Wiki on your code repository, Private: Confluence, SharePoint)
Purpose:
Artefacts:
Architecture Strategy
Purpose: Prepare a Development Environment that supports CI/CD
| Feature | Notes |
|---|---|
| Merging Pull Requests | a github webhook notifies jenkins of a commit |
| Code Compilation | oc build is called by jenkins |
| Integration Tests | code written that is run during the build phase of the deployment pipeline |
| Deployment | oc deploy called after the built image is tagged |
| Functional Tests | each test scenario template will be run, each having many test permutations |
| Code Testing Coverage Report | will show what lines of code the tests are activating |
| Code Complexity Analysis | an assessment of the code |
| Code Security Scan | displays bugs and errors to be adressed |
| Data Model Inspection | shows reports of the tables, columns, relationships, constraints |
| Tool | Purpose and Usage |
|---|---|
| Jira or Trello | Manage Product Backlog and Task completion status |
| Github, Git or Stash, Bitbucket | Manage Source Code, documentation of code changes |
| Jenkins | Control the pipeline flow |
| BDD Stack | Functional Testing |
| Gradlew or Maven | Builds the software |
| Sonarqube | Scans code for various testing purposes like test coverage, code complexity or code quality |
| Schema Spy | Graphical inspection of the physical database as implemented |
- To refine the Roadmap timelines
- Be able to report on changes to Scope and/or Budget
- Understand the definition of done
- Backlog of User Stories with story points
- An initial range estimate of team velocity
- Burn down chart using the gross and net velocity to give a date range
Each feature needs to be visually and technical designed so that you can collect early feedback from users and adapt to their needs.
Features that will provide value to users are broken down into small user stories, coded, documented and reviewed in order to ensure that the team is delivering high quality working software.
Developed software is continuously integrated with the rest of the system using automated testing, static code analysis, and functional testing.
Features are deployed as soon as they are done to Production to get rapid user feedback. If the Product Owner doesn't want a feature to be made available to users, the code is still deployed to Production with the feature toggled off.
- Behavior Driven Development
- Low Fidelity Mockups for rapid user feedback and design
- Description of the Data, logical data model
- High Fidelity Mockups to clarify the Definition of Done for a feature
- Data Model Development (Spreadsheet for logical model)
- Behavior Driven Development (BDD) Scenarios, (Tests)
- Automated Code Generation
- CRUD operations for all data objects
- API to calls on the CRUD operations
- Physical Database Models
- Custom API Specification & System Functions development
- Automated Integration Tests (ensure that APIs function)
- Functional Tests
To find redundant, duplicate, or low value features of the system that based on user research should be retired.
This may result in the retirement of an entire system, however that is not the ideal situation. A system that is retired in its entirety likely had many features that could have been removed previously.
Instead try regularly adapting to users needs and frequently retire the features that users no longer value. This strategy keeps your system as focused as possible on the high value effort and will extend its life by allow teams to spend time ensuring that it stays secure and functional.
How is it done?
- Talk to real users and get their feedback
- Use website analytics to monitor the usage of product features,
- Collect and resolve bugs & defects quickly to ensure that those features continues to provide value to the users.
- Once that feature reaches a point where it is shown for various reasons to no longer provide value, then that feature can be retired.
- The retirement phase should be ongoing from the moment you build your first mock up.
A feature having lots of bugs and defects should not be the reason you retire a feature. Sometimes your features just need a little care and feeding.