What is Agile?
There are several Agile methodologies, practices and tools that companies are using to manage projects. These practices mainly emerged from ‘Lean Manufacturing’ practices and were adopted and evolved by software engineers. The practices revolve around a clear, simple manifesto, which focussed the team on delivering a working product.
As well as in use in manufacturing and software development, many marketing and digital companies are using these practices to Project Manage their marketing campaigns, website projects and Digital Transformation (DX) programmes and projects.
Agile in Telecetera
In Telecetera, your software product development team are using the Scrum version of Agile to design, build, test, document, maintain & support your new Connect product.
The team first hold a ‘Sprint planning’ ceremony, which allows them to look at the Programme Backlog Items (PBIs) and discuss the work and priorities as a team. These are the Work Items that need implementing to either add new Features to the product, fix bugs and minor improvements as well as implement Customer suggestions.
The team work on a four-week duration Sprint cycle, focussing on a common Sprint Goal as a team. The team produces documentation and Test Plans as they work on the software code. Several times during the Sprint one of the team will run through all the manual Test Plans. A lot of testing is automated by way of Unit Tests, which test discrete parts of the software.
Agile Ceremonies - e.g. Daily Stand Ups (DSUs)
Every morning the whole team assemble in the Worcester office and/or on Microsoft Teams for a DSU. This ceremony is 10-15 minutes long and runs every morning. The team review their achievements since the previous day, explain what their tasks for the day ahead are and inform the team of any blockers (holding up work) or impediments (slowing up work). The DSU is facilitated by a Scrum Master. The Scrum Master coaches and mentors the team but does not tell them what to do. The team members must make collective decisions to prioritise and deliver the work in accordance with their Sprint goal. The team document the DSU in a Wiki page, which contains links to the Work Items being developed or actioned.
The team also explain any Tickets that have been raised in the ZenDesk support desk and their status. These often influence the Road Map, in ways that improve documentation, testing, the User Interface, or ideas for new Features, Views and Reports raised by Customers, which we happily implement.
Relentless focus on Quality
As we have 100s of Customers using Connect (some on the ‘Enterprise’ edition and some on the new ‘Cloud’ edition) it is essential that quality is maintained.
Therefore, Unit Testing and Test Plans are essential to maintaining a great service to our Customers. The team is coached to focus on quality and maintainability over cutting corners and lazy coding or poor implementation. Each section of software developed is reviewed by two other people in the team. Only when both team members approve the code is it pushed into the ‘master’ code branch, which is then fully testing again and released for Customer use.
End of Sprint Review (EOSR)
At the end of the Sprint a ‘Retrospective’ Board is created. Every team member creates one or two notes indicating something that can be improved and something that went well. The Scrum Master asks each Team Member to talk through the notes they created and why. The team then take on board suggestions and improvements they can make to their own behaviours, use of tool, practices, documentation gaps, and any other improvements that will improve the performance of the team. We seek to improve 100 things by 1% rather than make big changes that risk the quality of the product, reliability of the service or security of the data.
End of Sprint
If the month is longer than four weeks then the team has a few days of time to undertake some professional development, learn some new skills, evaluate new tools, or simply take some time off to rest and recharge. The Sprint Planning workshop for the next Sprint is created in the Company Calendar, and the new Work Items added in for consideration for the next Sprint.
Conclusions
As with most tech companies we are all learning Agile practices and improving our use of the methodologies, principles, tools and techniques with each Sprint. If you have any questions or suggestions about our Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) please contact us and we will respond within 24 hours.
Connect is your product and as such we are here to give you a great customer experience. Thank you for your suggestions, most of which get actioned.
Steve
Steve Borwell-Fox
Managing Director
Telecetera Ltd
