In every industry, the leading brands consciously go the extra miles to differentiate themselves. One of the main challenges in the Web Development industry especially in this part of the world, is the deployment of timely and successful web applications to the client.
How many times have you started a project and totally closed the project, clients and developers both satisfied about the success of the project without the client having to hound the developer with calls and emails complaining about delays.
About two weeks ago, we undertook a training at work on Agile Development theories as opposed to Waterfall Development. Even though Agile is not a new model, its quite new to me and it makes so much sense.
Basically Waterfall model is what a whole lot of businesses use especially around here: The client tells you what they want, the designers take over from there, pass on to the developers, then they test and then deploy.
With Agile, I could summarize to:
The client gives the requirement, a scrum master creates a story board, creates what is called the ‘backlog item’, divides the project into sprints. Each sprint lasting from a few days to a week(or two depending on the project). The most important thing is that at the end of each sprint, the client sees the current state of the product. He can then assess, give his feedback etc. Then the next sprint continues. Here, the client is in on every single hinge, every single turn of the project.
The most interesting thing for me is how everybody in the team work. Using Agile, every member of the team is gathered in a room, each member of the team signifying what part of the project he’s going to handle, and how many hours. Each day there’s a stand up meeting that shouldn’t last more than say 15minutes; every member updates every member on his side of the project. It makes it much more fun working together AS. A. TEAM.
I am here loving this model and can’t wait for proper integration into oncoming projects. I have my skepticisms. What about stubborn clients? What about projects that have been cursed to never end?I’d be writing about this soon.
For User Experience designers, you can read up Smashing Magazine’s post on Lead UX.
3 comments
Using a burn down chart in scrum to visualize your daily progress against the plan is pretty cool. Personally I prefer the DSDM approach to agile as suppose to Scrum. Anyway maybe its just the usual US vs UK thing. But its worth picking bits and pieces from everywhere depending on the project.
Apparently, after reading about the DSDM approach, I still fancy Scrum more. Maybe because it’s my first introduction to AGILE.