An Approach to Agile and Scrum - Part 1
14 October 2016
This is the first of a three part series about the concepts of Agile and Scrum, and how they have been used by Argenta.
We adopted an Agile approach to software development at Argenta about 12 months ago. Part of that approach takes the principles of the Scrum methodology and adapts them to suit our business. I think this is an important point for people considering taking on an Agile methodology, it has to suit the way your business is setup.
An example of this is related to the roles within the Scrum methodology. There are three main roles, Product Owner, Scrum Master and the Development Team. Due to the size of our team, the responsibilities relating to projects have been grouped into two main roles.
- Developer – responsible for defining, design and executing all requirements for the application
- Tester – responsible for testing everything that the Developer creates and handling communication with the client.
So the Scrum Master is incorporated into the Tester’s responsibilities and the Product Owner is incorporated into the Developer’s responsibilities. The way that we manage the tasks within a project is very similar to Scrum, in that we define Sprints, have daily reviews and Sprint reviews.
To assist in the management of projects we have gone a bit old school, rolling back to whiteboards and post it notes. We have found that this is a great visual method for managing task progress, project progress and time. Our whiteboard is supported by GitHub, where we document all tasks, tests and manage revisions of documents, code and data.
An Agile approach for Argenta has seen improvements in the delivery of tasks, efficiency of development and communication within the team. We’d definitely recommend it!
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