Evaluation Of Agile Methodology

A process to get things done.

Working with a solid Agile Methodology process was imperative for boosting communication and understanding within a team that consisted of multiple teams across various disciplines, as well as business product owners.
Knowledge and wisdom was spread evenly across all areas, with everyone having a sense of relativity brought to their perspective of the overall project. Not only was this practice able to get products to launch quickly but also efficiently, empowering teams to garner data and insights to move forwards in a pragmatic way with future product release cycles. It was a win win all around.

Agile Story Writing

• As a ...
• I want to ...
• So that ...

Rather than listing a bunch of tasks for individuals in a team it was far more cohesive to write user stories to ensure each team member knew exactly what they were doing and also why.
This gave every team member a good perspective of the larger picture no matter how small the task they were implementing.

Agile Estimation & Story Sizing

Team user story sizing allowed for individuals in the team to get a good context of everyones else's user stories as well as the relativity of all tasks in the wider scheme of the project. Once relativity is set, then the complexity for each story was assigned using a Fibonacci number scale to determine each story point.
The result of this was that group wisdom was attained withing the team and over time, new features were estimated accurately to the dollar ensuring better efficiency withing the division.

Agile Sprints

Using iteration cycles tied to products development releases was a no-brainer. To be able to get a real world product off the ground and operational quickly. All Sprints were the same length and played a factor in the story sizing process for individual user stories. Each Sprint was structured with with a brief planning phase at the beginning and a retrospective phase at the end.
The results: Agile sprints accompanied with iteration planning and execution was instrumental in being able to deliver real world solutions much sooner once piece at a time.

Agile Software

Once the main fundamentals of Agile Methodology are understood and in practice, it is fairly easy to make use of the multitude of Agile software available for teams to help the process.

Common enterprise tools like JIRA and Agile Central can help organizations improve communication across teams, boost collaboration and provide the ability to start measuring and quantifying the cost and efficiency of the Agile team process.

Conlusion

The Agile process from my experience proved extremely powerful. As much of a buzz word as it can be, it really does work when implemented properly. However the barrier to entry for successful implementation requires a lot of effort. There are many moving parts from getting the adequate training and synchronizing teams across multiple disciplines to converge around the same principles and working together. It can be a huge undertaking depending on a companies existing infrastructure, but on the other side if executed correctly it is well worth the effort.