Using Agile methodologies to streamline project management
For most of our projects we do Scrum following these general rules:
- The Product Owner is a client representative
- The Scrum master role is usually fulfilled by the Arnia’s team technical lead role
- Each Sprint duration is usually two weeks long
- Our daily Scrum stand-up meetings are set to max. 2 min. per team member
- Within each Sprint we have:
- A Grooming meeting, which is organized during the last week of the Sprint, in preparation to the Planning meeting
- A Planning meeting, usually taking place in the first day of the Sprint. The immediate result of this meeting is the Sprint backlog
- A Retrospective meeting, usually taking place in the last Thursday or Friday of the Sprint. The result is an action plan to improve, with clear responsibilities assigned
- In the last day of the Sprint, we prepare the Sprint status report, which is sent to every party with interest in the project lifecycle
- The Product backlog will be maintained in an online tool (such as Jira Atlassian)
- Weekly (or whenever needed) Sprint statuses are shared via e-mails and/or via direct communication (live meetings) with the project stakeholders.
Methods and techniques
We always try to emphasis during the project lifecycle the usage of those methods and techniques which best fit the Agile methodology/concepts:
Prototyping & Frequent Customer Validation
Continuous Integration
Pair Programming
Code Review
Test Driven Development
Code Refactoring
As a general rule, the Scrum project management processes will be minimized as much as possible – we target to avoid project oversizing and unnecessary/low-value procedures and activities.
