Byte Musings

In this post, I'm going to talk about estimating in agile. In agile world, before sprint planning happens, the team would go through the backlog and estimate them in terms of Story Points. This would provide a relative high level estimate for the team/management so that they can proceed with Sprint planning. Story Points: Story Pointing is a technique wherein the team gets together and understands the high level requirements for each story and provides a rough number indicating the complexity of the story. The team would brainstorm on the high level requirements and come to a consensus on the story points. If team members disagree, then they have to give justification on why they disagree and try to arrive at a consensus. (Scrum master can play the role of moderator in these discussions). Story Pointing is NOT time based, but rather, is based on complexity. The rationale here is that some tasks would take less time but are complicated and needs more focus than few other ...

In this post, we are going to see what is a Product backlog and what is a Sprint backlog and the differences between the two. Product backlog: The product backlog is an ordered list of everything that might be needed in the product and is the single source of requirements for any changes to be made to the product. A product backlog contains a list of product backlog items. The items could be in the form of: Story - short description of what the user wants from the product (eg., As a online retailer I need a catolog of products to be displayed). Bug Epic - represents bigger user stories The items which are of high priority will be at the top of the backlog. The product backlog is maintained and managed by the product owner.  Progressive Refinement: It is a process wherein items at the top of the backlog will have more details into it than the ones at the bottom of the backlog. With time, and as and when the the backlog items at the top a...

In this post, we will talk about the various roles and responsibilities associated with Scrum. In scrum, generally there are 3 distinguished roles as follows: Product Owner Scrum master The Team 1. Product Owner The role of a Product Owner is very crucial in the making the product a success in the market, as it deals with the "What" and the "Why" of the product. Is one who has a product vision on how the product should look like, what should be its features etc. Unsurprisingly, the product owner should have very good domain expertise. Communicates with various stakeholders like sponsor, client, end users and gathers requirements. Also responsible for end user satisfaction, has overall commitment to product road map. Also responsible for ROI (return on investment) and work out the budget constraints. 2. Scrum master Scrum master is more of a facilitator and a coach who gives valuable advice to the team. The roles include: Make sure every...

In this post (and a a few more to come), I will be writing about Agile methodology and how it works. What is agile? Agile is a methodology, a way of managing projects which is emerged as an alternative to traditional software management (also termed as "Waterfall" model). In Waterfall model, we perform the following: Team gathers requirements Team comes up with design and architecture  Team implements (coding) Release it to market Now, lets say it is a huge project and took around 6 months to complete. At the end of six months, when the product is released, the team realizes that this is not what the customer wanted or the market conditions have changed and the customer wants lot of modifications to the product.  There is only one shippable deliverable in this process and that was produced at the end of 3rd step, which took months together. Clearly, there is a problem with this process. Why Agile? Agile as the name suggests is a process which allows th...