Daily Stand-up: What, How, Who and When.

What are daily stand-ups?

Daily stand-ups is adopted by agile team to provide a status update to team and to continuously improve the team velocity by meeting up daily and talking about:

• What were accomplished since the last meeting.
• What will be taken up before the next meeting.
• What obstacles are preventing progress.

Transitioning to agile development.

Agile development methods has been hearing praise from lots of development teams and customers all around the world. It has become one of the best alternative process against the traditional waterfall model. There are many people who have one main question in their mind. How can we start agile development?

Transitioning to agile is not an easy task. Especially for a team that have been following the traditional approach for a long time. This requires a major shift in the mind-set in everyone involved, time investments and lots of guts and self-motivation.

Scrum Roles and Responsibilities

Introduction

Scrum is a agile development technique which makes developing complex software products easier. Scrum values the customer feedback. Prototypes of the product in short intervals so that early customer feedback can be used to deliver higher quality software. Scrum highly relies on a highly motivated, closely collaborating, cross-functional and self-organized teams.

Scrum is not a full process or methodology, it is a framework. It does not provide a complete, detailed descriptions of how everything is to be done. The Scrum team is given the power of deciding how most of the things should be done. The team will know best how to solve the problem as they are presented. This flexibility is the key success factor of the Scrum.

Writing User Stories Effectively

Introduction

Agile methodology and eXtreme Programming are among the most admired and followed software development methodologies. It is being preferred over the traditional waterfall model. The artifacts are smaller, delivered faster and with higher quality. There are no differences in the phases these two methodologies have.

• Requirement Specification
• Design
• Development
• Testing

But the key deference is how each of these phases function. In Agile, these phases become part of an iteration. I am not going to explain Agile programming here, since it is a separate beast. This article expects a basic awareness of agile methodology / eXtreme Programming. So for all those freshers who have just came out of college, I would suggest you have a look at Agile practices before taking a leap into this article.