ModuleWorks goes Agile - Follow up

Last time on the blog, we talked about our latest Agile initiative, evaluating the benefits of adapting this type of approach to product development with the core 5-Axis development team. As promised, we’re now following up and reporting on the results.

Sprint Burndown chart 

The burndown chart for the sprint is shown below and shows progress towards completion for the allocated story points.







The team have completed the first full release cycle using the Agile process, and this was followed by a series of review meetings to assess the strengths and weaknesses.  The key points were as follows:-

Good points J
·         Full task list available and visible to whole team helps estimation and assignment
·         Improves knowledge of code and application of team member
·         Good for training new individuals, as the whole team helps to share the load
·         Good to work closely with fellow team members
·         Improved communication between Developers and the QA/Product team

Bad points L
·         Too many meetings
·         More experienced developers can lose productivity
·         Urgent tasks can disrupt the process

To add some metrics, that may be of interest to the management types out there, there were 84 Tasks completed, compared to 59 in the previous release.  Overall, the number of tasks done suggests an improved productivity, although this could be down to various factors (easier tasks, larger team, etc.).   It is difficult to measure the improvement in productivity increased, but there is no evidence to suggest it has decreased.  

We’ve decided to continue with the Scrum evaluation over the next release cycle, but will refine the process to address the negatives. We'll report back on how the process works in a future blog.. A variation on this short article will follow in the next newsletter in April. Use the link at the top of the blog to sign up.

Lots of good material out there on the web, Mike Cohn's blog at Mountain Goat Software is a pretty good place to start. I'm also going to look round and see if there are any examples of the progress tracking charts we used that I can add to the article. - see the burndown chart now added above.

Until the next time

The ModuleWorks Blogger