Lean and Agile Software Development (continued)

At the beginning of each iteration, or “sprint,” the team sits down with the product owner for a sprint planning meeting.

The Sprint Planning Meeting

The product owner is responsible for representing the customer’s needs and priorities and often provides the funding for the project. In the first part of the meeting, she lays out the vision for what the product is expected to do and how it should perform. The team then clarifies the content, purpose, meaning, and intentions of the product owner’s vision and develops an associated list of product priorities in the form of “stories” and places them in the “product backlog”.

The team then “sizes” the stories based on their judgment of how much time it will take for development. The product owner then prioritizes the stories based on her judgment about which are most important given the team's size estimates. Stories with a larger number of “points” will take longer and may be more complex to develop. Therefore, the product owner may need to make tradeoffs about what needs to be done next.

After a round of prioritization, the team plans the tasks required to complete its work in the upcoming iteration, then sets about developing software.

The Daily Standup

Over the course of each iteration, the team holds a “daily standup meeting”, where each member reports on the progress of their tasks, talks about their upcoming tasks, and surfaces any impediments they’ve encountered. The meeting is not for problem-solving. Instead, the Impediments are handled by the scrum master, who works on removing them after the standup meeting.

At the end of the iteration, the team holds a sprint review meeting.

The Sprint Review Meeting

In this meeting, the team presents what was developed over the course of the iteration to the product owner and other key stakeholders. They provide feedback on the results and determine what the team should do next. After the sprint review meeting, the team engages in a project retrospective in which the team looks back on its
performance and identifies improvements that it can incorporate into its work
for the next iteration.

The Sprint Retrospective

Central to agile and scrum is the project team retrospective. Retrospectives are conducted at the end of each iteration after the sprint review meeting and engage teams in reflection on the last iteration so that they can improve their results on the next. Retrospectives result in concrete action items that the team plans for implementation. Great retrospectives use lean principles and tools to eliminate waste and improve customer satisfaction.

More and more software development organizations are moving towards lean and agile development because of the following primary benefits:

• Delivers value to the business quickly
• Eliminates waste and non-value added work
• Improves quality and reduces defects
• Enables teams to learn quickly and continually improve

It is no wonder that so many organizations are adopting these practices to substantially improve the way they deliver software.

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