Hi folks,
In this blog I discuss a few practices that can help one manage a software development team effectively using the Agile methodology. They are as follows:
- Use good tools e.g. Jira or Trello to manage requirements.
- Use a backlog to store all requirements that may be useful to complete by the team but are not ready for current work.
- Clarify new requirements from business before presenting it to software development team – this can be done by development team lead or business analyst.
- Have your software devleopment team estimate efforts to complete requirements together as a group. You can use story points to estimate efforts where story points may be roughly mapped to days. it’s common for teams to use fibonacci sequence for story points.
- Break down large requirements into smaller tasks that can each be completed within a couple of days.
- Have daily stand-up calls to monitor progress of the software development team.
- Have periodic sprints of e.g. 1 week or 2 weeks to serve as checkpoints to monitor progress of the development team.
- Don’t drag requirements from sprint to sprint unnecessarily. Try to have the team complete requirements they have committed to complete in a given sprint.
- If you’re nearing the end of a sprint and a developer needs a task to pick up, you can look at any task in the backlog that can to be completed within the sprint and assign that task to the developer. If there’s no such task, you can look at sub-tasks of any larger tasks in the backlog that can be completed in the sprint. You can then convert that sub-task into a regular task (you can update the task title to indicate it’s a sub-task of the parent for easier tracking). Then assign the new task to the developer.
- Perform retrospectives from time to time to get feedback from developers on how they’re faring with work.
- Have frequent software releases to production. Don’t let features pile up too much otherwise it could lead to difficult in troubleshooting issues.
Till next time, happy software development.