A quick look at how my small team at the FCC is beginning to use Agile methods to develop a web application; the tools, the methods, the lessons we're learning. SO FAR, SO GOOD.

I had dabbled with an Agile Development approach before. A few of my old teams had implemented scrums, but the idea never really took.

A little bit of training

A few months ago I was lucky enough to take part in a week long course on Agile, its methods, and the ideas behind it. The key to this course, at least for me, was the instructor. He practice what he preached, was enthusiastic, and even taught the course using an Agile approach. I say “lucky” because I loved it, I got it, and I wanted to start using it.

Implementing

Luckily a small team at the FCC had a project in the works so we decided to make it our Agile test project. Here is a simplified version of what we have done to this point:

• Created a complete backlog of all tasks and organized them into good, better, best phases. Good being we needed the feature to go into production, better being it would be cool to have but not required, and best being it would be really, really cool but can definitely wait.
• We set 2 week sprints.
• We defined the number of points we thought we could accomplish in a sprint.
• Gave points to each task in the backlog.
• We created a burn chart.
• And finally we added features from the backlog to the first sprint.
• Started daily scrums.
• Got to work!

We have been using Trello for our story board, Github to for our code versioning, and Github Issues to track our issues.

Status

Our project is running very smoothly and we are currently way ahead of schedule. I can’t help but think that Agile is at least part of the reason. We are learning more about the process as we go and how we can tweak it to suit our teams needs; Agile is (and should be) flexible. More to come as we continue the project.

Part 2 of the Agile Development process - Github Issues

Part 3 of the Agile Development process - Milestons