At a recent Atlassian Community Event, I was asked to present on a topic of my choice. After some thought (and, to be honest, a poll to our Client Delivery team), I decided on Release Management. It's a frequent topic of discussion with our clients: how can I understand what will be or is released? Also, what changed between what was in Production to what is in Production now? 

I've seen many complicated solutions and I've seen many simple solutions. However, your team, your company, or your organization has to hash out the following: 

• What is your definition of "Done"?
• What is your definition of "Release"?
• Are these two things in conflict? 

Definition of Done versus Definition of Release

As you may already know, in Scrum, "Done" is when the Product Owner accepts the story as complete, meeting all acceptance criteria, and packaged into a potentially shippable increment. While I agree with this definition, at the same time I challenge the phrase, "potentially shippable." This is where you, your teams, your operations teams, and your product managers need to have a conversation. Does "Done" and "Released" mean the same thing across your organization? 

In one organization, they had four definitions of done: Done, Done-Done, Done-Done-Done, and Done-Done-Done-Done. In reality, they were defining the QA, deployment, and Production Release processes with the four separate definitions of "Done". This was also directly related to their use of Jira Software and how to demonstrate success to management. Notice I said success and not progress. The Teams wanted credit for code complete in Jira Software to demonstrate a predictable velocity. QA wanted credit for test complete in Jira Software to demonstrate a continuous flow. Release Managers wanted credit in Jira Software for integration activities before deploying to production. Operations wanted credit in Jira Software for the production deployment. As you can imagine, this was relatively messy in Jira Software and tying work from code complete through release to Production was excruciating. 

While Done may be clearer to your organization, "Release" may not be as clear. Different parts of the organization will have different definitions of Release. For a team, "Release" may mean the code has been deployed to a QA environment. For Operations, "Release" may mean deployment to Production. In the example above, "Done" and "Release" meant the same thing among the teams, QA, and Release Management, but not Operations. Nor did it mean the same thing across the organization. Without clarity across the organization, tracking and managing Releases in Jira Software becomes nearly impossible. Clearly defining "Done" and clearly defining "Release" across the organization can drive organizational alignment. Once you understand these two concepts, you can manage these in Atlassian using the following two methods: The Release Issue Type or Bitbucket Pipelines.

Method One: The Release Issue Type

Within your SDLC projects in Jira Software, create a new Issue Type called, "Release." This lets the organization know that, while code is complete, there are additional items that need to be fostered through the process. These may include documentation, release notes, a hardening sprint, or anything that can foster work from code complete to Production. The additional items can be managed as Sub-Tasks of the Release to understand the scope of work needed to move it through the process. 

As with any new Issue Type, the Release will need a Workflow. The Workflow can be simple, however, we recommend using a Ready for Production Status in the workflow. When integrating Jira Software with Jira Service Management, the transition to Ready for Production is a perfect time to automate creating a Change Request. Your Operations team can review the change request with a link back to the Release Issue Type. 

How do we know which stories and bugs are tied to the Release? Do we link all the work to the Release Issue Type? No. I mean, you could, but why take the time to do that? Is it really a value-added activity for traceability? Is there another way to tie these things together that could be quicker and easier? the answer: Yes. 

Even long-time users of Jira Software forget about Versions. If used properly, Versions can provide every team the status, progress, and any known issues in a single view in the Release Hub. This is true for all development activities AND the Release issue. By adding the Fix Version of the intended Release, every part of the organization can see the progress of the Release. Because JQL supports Versions, all items tied to a Fix Version can be displayed in other places such as a Dashboard or a Confluence page. With a little up-front discipline during backlog refinement, or sprint planning, or even big room planning, managing a release is as simple as adding a Fix Version to the work as well as the Release issue. 

Once the Release issue has been deployed to Production, always go back and release the Version in Jira Software. Anything that is not in a "Done" status category can either move to the next Version or be removed from any Version entirely. 

What if a story or bug spans multiple Releases? There is still only one Release issue per Version. However, I would also challenge you to take a look (again) at your definition of Done versus your definition of Release. Are you actually completing the work or are you pushing it forward again and again because there's a problem? In the next backlog refinement meeting and/or retrospective, ask why this continues to happen. Really dig in and understand whether the work needs to be moved to an Epic, de-prioritized, completed in the next sprint, or abandoned altogether. 

Method Two: Bitbucket Pipelines

Using Bitbucket Pipelines still requires your organization to have a conversation defining "Done" and "Release". However, the entities that support these definitions are different when integrating Jira Software and Bitbucket Pipelines. The Release is managed through the Pipeline and requires little human intervention. Instead, we work with a series of Workflow Triggers and automated deployments to determine where the Release is in its process. 

You still need to create a Version in Jira Software. You still need good discipline during backlog refinement and sprint planning to ensure work is tied to the correct Version. You may also choose to halt the automation just before deployment to Production based on your Change Management processes. Clarify the process before implementing in Atlassian. 

After your Version is created and work is tagged with the Version, add Triggers to your development workflows. For example, you can automate a transition from Open to In Progress based on the creation of a Branch in Bitbucket. You can also automate a transition to Closed or Done once a Pull Request is merged. Triggers in Jira Workflows keep people focused on the work instead of Jira Software. But where Bitbucket Pipelines really shine is everything that happens after code is merged. Separate Pipelines can be created per environment. For example, if you need to manually deploy to production, a Pipeline can automate the process through build and deploy to a staging environment after it passes all checks. Commits, build, and deploy information is visible in the Development Panel of the individual story or bug. You can even quickly understand failures and receive additional information by clicking on the failure. For a specific Version, as long as work is tagged, you can aggregate the overall health of the Release in the Release Hub by viewing the Version. Status, success, warnings, and errors are available in a central location. If everything looks good, simply click a button and deploy to Production. Alternatively, if the staging deployment is successful, automate the production deployment in the Pipeline as well. 

Which one is right for you? 

At Praecipio Consulting, we believe the answer is: "It depends." Regulatory compliance, risk tolerance, product uptime requirements, etc., may dictate which method is right for your organization. And, to boot, the answer can be different for different parts of the organization. However, the critical first step to implementing release management in Atlassian is to have a conversation. Are your definitions of "Done" and "Release" at odds with one another? What do they mean from a process perspective? Is there room for improvement in those definitions? We here at Praecipio Consulting have extensive experience with both Release Management best practices and the Atlassian suite of products. Contact us to find out how we can help you manage your releases more effectively. 

TL;DR: No!

Can one person hold both the Product Owner (PO) and ScrumMaster(SM) role in an Agile team? It's a question that a lot of companies starting their way through their Agile transformation will ask themselves (and us!). The Scrum team has three specific roles: Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and (most importantly) the Development team. It's clear why the question of combining SM and PO comes up so often - trying to figure out where current roles fit into the new dynamic can be a challenge for an organization, especially if your teams are now smaller and you don't have enough resources to fill the role of an SM and PO for each team. 

However, combining these roles is the biggest disservice you can do for your Agile teams. It may seem like a small tweak to the model, but given the functions of the two roles, you are setting up your teams for failure. Let's start with the definitions of these two roles so we can see why that is. 

Product Owner

The focus of the Product Owner is on the Product, as you might have guessed by now.  According to ScrumAlliance.org, "The Product Owner defines the what--as in what the product will look like and what features it should contain." The PO is responsible for maintaining the product backlog, and are responsible for communicating with stakeholders internally and externally to identify what the development team is working on. In their day-to-day, they are responsible for creating and prioritizing backlog items and communicating with the team expectations and acceptance of complete work items. 

ScrumMaster

The focus of the ScrumMaster is the team. "The ScrumMaster helps the Scrum Team perform at their highest level. They also protect the team from both internal and external distractions. ScrumMasters hold the Scrum Team accountable to their working agreements, Scrum values, and to the Scrum framework itself", as defined by ScrumAlliance.org. Where the PO is focused on What, the SM is focused on Who and How.  Arguably, the most important part of this definition is the emphasis on protecting the team. Internal distractions often come in the form of scope creep – new scope being introduced once work has already been committed to. In Scrum this often looks like new stories or bugs being introduced in the middle of a Sprint, and the job of the SM is to prevent this from happening as much as possible.

While I'm sure that we all know that some scope creep is inevitable (unless perhaps you're inhabiting the perfect utopia of business environments, in which case, I'll keep an eye out for my invite), but it can get out of hand quickly if there is no one on the team who is able to push back against the business. 

Okay, so why can't they be the same person?

By definition, the role of the ScrumMaster is to protect the team from the Product Owner (and the stakeholders that they are representing). Blurring the lines between these two roles mean that there is no one to push back when scope is added last minute, or ensure that the team is sticking to Scrum best practices, despite heavy workloads.

The most common outcomes that we see when these two roles are combined are:

1. Tons of scope creep. Just, loads of it. All over the place.
2. Sprint commitments are consistently not met because the team is being asked to do more work than they've agreed they are able to. 
3. Product Owners assign out work to the team , as they are now "Managing" the team. 
4. Buggier products –  after all, if I'm a developer trying to get through more work than I've acknowledged I can do, quality is inevitably going to suffer

Overall, not great!!

So what should I do then?

In a perfect world, you should have a single ScrumMaster per team, and Product Owner per product. This means that Product Owners can span multiple teams, if the teams are working from the same product backlog, but ScrumMasters are dedicated to a single team. If you don't have enough resources to commit to this model, in the short term, a ScrumMaster could potentially span more than one agile team - but I would say no more than 2 - after all, one person can only attend so many Scrum ceremonies while also being available to unblock their teams. 

However, the long term success of your Agile transformation means that it's time to start planning to fill those roles. Combining these roles will almost certainly decrease the effectiveness of your move to agile, as your teams are left unprotected and (likely) overworked. 

Looking for more information on Scrum best practices? Check out Sprint Planning - How long should sprints be? or Agile Batch Size: An Ode to Laundry. 

The short answer: Not really. Stories and bugs are both software development items by different names. As such, the vast majority of activities and controls that we model for a story are applicable to bugs. The key distinction between stories and bugs often comes down to data. Bugs should include Affects Version/s, Steps to Recreate, Expected Behavior, and Actual Behavior. How and when we require this data relies on what practices we're observing.

For teams using Kanban practices where there is a Backlog status and a Ready for Development status, the transition to Ready for Development can be used to capture required data based on issue type. In this simple case, we would have two transitions from Backlog, Ready for Dev and Ready for Dev - Bug. For each transition, include a transition-specific screen to capture the appropriate fields.  Example: SDLC Ready for Dev - Bug Transition Screen will include: Affects Version/s, Steps to Recreate, Expected Behavior, and Actual Behavior in addition to any other fields needed in both cases. Then, leveraging your workflow conditions allow the Bug issue type to only use the Ready for Dev - Bug transition. All other issue types can default to the Ready for Development transition by explicitly checking that the current issue type is not a bug.

The considerations above work well in workflow cases where you have gated controls as a function of status change. This might apply to teams that include requirements definitions and design efforts within the story or bug life cycle (as might be the case with Waterfall). Additionally, this logical approach allows for workflow reuse which in turn decreases administrative burden and increases process consistency.

Scrum teams view Ready for Development a bit differently. Good Scrum practices dictate that product owners will refine their backlog as items are prioritized upward. Refinement provides all functional details necessary for the scrum team to be able to work the ticket including validation of bug reports and associated details. Once prioritized, the development team will review stories and bugs at the top of the backlog to make sure they understand the requirements. The work is considered Ready for Development at the moment it is accepted in to a sprint.

I hope this explanation helps you avoid unnecessary workflows!

"How many hours are in a Story Point? Pink. Because penguins don't like ice cream." -Amanda Babb in every conversation about hours and story points. 

While I use this example as a cheeky way to say the two methods of estimation (hours and story points) don't coincide, the reality, of course, is much more complex. Business and product teams typically think in terms of dates and schedules. Development and operations teams typically think in terms of level of effort. That's not to say story points and dates do not nor will ever coincide, it's a matter of how to speak each other's language. 

What is a Story Point?

Our Dragon of the West, Christopher Pepe, explained it well in a previous post. Humans are terrible at numbers. That's why we have so many ways to express things without using numbers. For example, I have Big Dog (Leonard) and Tiny Dog (Howard). Tiny is small in comparison to Big Dog. However, at 50 pounds, he's not small compared to, say, a Chihuahua. This is what we call relative estimation in the agile world. This thing is larger or more complex than the other thing over there: it will take a larger level of effort to complete. 

Computers, on the other hand, are wonderful at numbers. It's part of the reason we invented them. In Jira Software, a story point is simply the numerical expression of a relative estimate. When we need to understand the level of effort of more than one thing, we aggregate the relative estimate into a total level of effort. This is known as the commit in a velocity chart. As we complete work, we burn down the level of effort until we understand what's left. At the end of a sprint, we determine whether we met our commit or not. The completion of the work over several sprints determines our velocity. From there, we can reasonably predict the level of effort we can complete during a sprint. 

Why can't a team estimate in hours? 

It's not a matter of can't. At Praecipio Consulting, we've seen many teams succeed well in estimating their level of effort in hours. However, this involved a significant effort to run time studies on routine tasks for the team. In a time study, an outside party will watch a person do a task and time it. Then watch them do it again...and again...and again. Then, the outside party watches another person perform the same task several times. The outside observer will continue with this until they feel they have sufficient data to make a reasonable assumption (read: average) of the time it takes to complete said task. Rinse and repeat for all tasks all personnel complete in a day and through out the week. 

Estimating in hours works well in repetitive work environments. The same tasks must be completed the same (or similarly enough) throughout the day and week. However, when we're thinking about software development, we all know this is rarely the case. What may seem like a simple feature request can become a significant effort when looking at how the new feature interacts with the rest of the services, modules, or products. Yes, we've done something similar before and it took four hours. But what has changed since the last time we implemented something similar? What else have we deployed? Did we change our methods? Are we integrating this with another system? Have the APIs been updated or changed? How many releases have been performed since the last time we did this? 

The shoulds and shouldn'ts of tracking time in Scrum

Why are teams being asked to track time when they estimate and understand level of effort in story points? In a word, Money. Under complex financial and regulatory practices, most businesses report quarterly earnings to regulatory bodies and markets. The best way a business has to gather and report this information is through complex financial systems that aggregate data from inputs across the organization. One of the more critical inputs? Time tracking. So how should we and shouldn't we track time in a scrum team? 

• You should establish the minimum time guideline such as 15-minute or 30-minute increments
• You should not expect accuracy down to the minute for a given task
• You should expect the team(s) to continue to estimate their level of effort in story points
• You should not make the team switch to hours to estimate their level of effort
• You should centralize where the team should track time
• You should not expect the user to log in to multiple tools to track time
• You should download our Lean Budgets White Paper which details different ways of managing the data and provides a solution in Jira Align
• You should not expect to implement a fundamental change in financial tracking and reporting across your organization without help

At Praecipio Consulting, we have implemented several solutions to this problem across industries and with all sizes of organizations. For help regarding how your teams can balance time tracking, scrum, and financial reporting, feel free to reach out to us! 

Type "Agile myths" in your favorite search engine and you'll be amazed at the plethora of results. Especially those that say, "Top myths busted!" While I consider myself an Agile evangelist, I'd like to take a moment to discuss the harsh reality that many organizations face day-to-day. Agile is not a new concept, but the term is. The Agile Manifesto codified the term and working agreements in 2001, but I (and other evangelists) argue that it existed way before the term was formalized then attached strictly to software development. 

Iterative Development of Complex Systems

"I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of 2 million parts — all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract." - attributed to astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn 

There were three Apollo missions before a person was ever placed in a rocket to (eventually) go to the moon. February through August of 1966 saw rocket, heat shield, and in-orbit fuel performance tests before a person set foot in the capsules. After the tragedy of Apollo 1, three more unmanned missions were flown before NASA decided to try again. It took an additional four Apollo missions before Apollo 11, and the iconic first step happened in 1969. That giant leap didn't happen with Big Up Front Requirements. It happened with teams of teams working together, iterating, retrospecting, and making adjustments. Isn't that Agile and moreover Agile at scale? 

How many other times in history did we as humans nail something the first time? The Wright Brothers didn't just magically produce an airplane that sustained controlled flight in 1903. Carl Faberge didn't create imperial eggs immediately upon his return to St. Petersburg in 1872. It's not called WD-1, it's called WD-40. Agile is how we've developed some of our greatest inventions, art, and human achievements. 

Scrum versus Kanban Agile

Let's take a step back and look at the two most popular frameworks of Agile: Scrum and Kanban. Instead of boring you with the typical definitions, instead, let's look at why teams and organizations think they choose one over the other. 

Scrum

"I am guaranteed to release product to my customers every two weeks."

Potentially shippable product does not mean it's in the hands of the customers. It means it meets the team's definition of done. It may have to be deployed into an integration or stage environment before production for further integration and testing before being released. 

"We don't have to estimate capacity, we just estimate the work."

Scrum (and Agile in general) is about predictability. If you delivered an amount of work this sprint, you should be able to deliver a similar amount for "the next sprint. If your velocity makes wild swings from sprint to sprint, there's a larger problem. A good team plans their sprint delivery based on their past performance. Which leads to another one...

"There is no long-term planning, just short-term execution."

Scrum is where long-term product planning meets short-term execution. Products and product features are extremely long-lived if they are the right things. No one wants to spend time and money on things that customers won't use or don't work.  

Kanban

"We do Kanban because Scrum takes too much time."

Kanban was born from lean manufacturing. There is always a daily standup at the beginning of the shift. In best-in-class manufacturing, there is also a weekly meeting for metrics and a monthly safety meeting. In order to be successful, your Kanban teams should be taking almost the same amount of time!

"Kanban isn't planned or managed. Just executed."

The Kanban backlog is just as refined as a Scrum backlog. Based on classes of service, the team plans their work each day and throughout the week. For example, work in the "standard" class of service is defined as start to finish in the calendar week. 

"Our team isn't a software development team."

I waver on this one. Unless you are pure customer service (think call center), you likely have larger projects you're trying to complete. 

So what?

Given all of the above, it's safe to say there is definitely no single right way to be Agile (although there are LOTs of wrong ways!). As an organization, there will likely be growing pains while you try to figure out how teams work best. 

Agile is not a thing you do. It's not a software development framework. It's not a 40-hour skill. Or a two-week sprint skill. Or even a Program Increment skill. It's a mindset...nay...I would argue it's a lifestyle. Agile is all around us if you open yourself to it. 

Looking for more tips on how to be Agile? Check out Agile Batch Size: An Ode to Laundry or The ABC's of Agile. And if you want to know more about how to successfully implement Agile in your organization, reach out to us! 

Teams new to Scrum face lots of decisions - one key decision for teams to perform efficiently is determining sprint length.  

Scrum and Sprint Definitions

Scrum is an Agile framework that gives teams guidelines on how to complete their work. It contains sets of roles, ceremonies, and considerations for how your work is completed. 

A sprint is a concept in scrum that represents a time box - a short amount of time the team has committed to complete the work. Sprints can be as long as you want - however, it's most common for sprints to be between 1 and 4 weeks. Teams running scrum need to decide what makes sense for them.

What we often see is that team's first instincts lean toward the extreme: Either 1 week sprints or 4 weeks sprints. While there are arguments for the varying lengths of sprints, here are some common questions that you and your team should consider: 

Planned vs. Unplanned Work

If you are a scrum team that has high variability in your work, longer sprints may give you a necessary buffer. If you've got a one week sprint (with 1 of your 5 days already dedicated to ceremonies), even one or two unplanned pieces of work can prevent your team from completing the committed scope. 

On the other hand, if the team has unplanned work with a lower level of urgency, shorter sprints give you the opportunity to include the work in your sprint planning within a shorter time period. 

Time Dedicated to Scrum ceremonies

How much time per week should be spent doing sprint planning, retrospectives, backlog grooming, and demos? Shorter sprints mean more time is spent in these meetings. If you do not have dedicated roles (scrum master, product owner) this becomes even more essential. 

What we see in 1 week sprints is that teams can lose a full day (twenty percent of the sprint!) of each sprint to demos, retros, and planning. The shorter your sprints are, the more often you're having these ceremonies. 

Scope and Size of Tasks

Is your work small enough that it can be completed in the sprint length? If you are often not completing work in 1 sprint, a longer sprint may make sense (or you may just need to work on improving properly sizing your tasks).

Feedback cycle

How often do I want to see and evaluate completed work? Is it acceptable to go 4 weeks without a demonstration of the work that's being done? Do you need to know every week? Sprint length determines how often you'll see sprint demos and complete sprint retrospectives. 

Inspection and Adaptation

There's no one-size-fits-all answer to sprint length, and iteration is the key to scrum - so don't worry if your first choice doesn't work for your team. That's what your retrospectives are for, after all!

For more background on how we do agile, read our case study on how Praecipio Consulting takes on agile transformation. 

Are you looking for ways to make your work more flexible and efficient, but feeling late to the Agile transformation party? Well, fear not! It's OK to be fashionably late to this Agile shindig!

Out of the many Agile Development frameworks out there, Scrum and Kanban are arguably the best known - similarities include their focus on continual improvement, and minimizing waste; breaking down large pieces of work into manageable, bitesize chunks for efficient delivery. However, it's important to understand the differences when looking to choose which style of working is right for you and your team.

What is Kanban?

Kanban, a workflow visualization tool, was first developed in the 1940s by Taiichi Ohno, for Toyota. Faced with a lack of productivity compared to their American rivals, the aim was to find a way to optimize productivity alongside their cost-intensive inventory of raw materials. A continuously improving process, Kanban uses boards with team-determined limitations to limit WIP (work-in-progress), identify and eliminate bottlenecks quickly and improve efficiencies among the team. Formal training is not required for teams to get started in Kanban, and, given that Kanban boards are intended to be used by everyone on the project, there is less need for cross-functional team members - it's easy to get started with Kanban quickly!

What is Scrum?

Although the history of Scrum is not without its controversies, it is widely understood that Scrum was developed in the 90s by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, to present at the OOPSLA conference in Austin, Texas. Sutherland and Schwaber borrowed the term "Scrum" from Takeuchi/Nonaka's paper ‘The New New Product Development Game’ - comparing a team sport like rugby with success in the 'game' of product development. Scrum is far more structured than Kanban - with commitments to short iterations of work, team members have designated roles and responsibilities (product owner, scrum master, team members), with clear priorities identified by the product owner. High visibility engages and increases team accountability, while daily meetings enable blockers to be identified and dealt with quickly; sprints (and potentially shippable increments) are generally being delivered every 2 weeks. It is this lithe process which allows Scrum teams to quickly adapt to change, maintaining and building upon team efficiencies in future sprints.

Which method is right for me?

The long and short answer is that there's no right answer for everyone. The best thing you can do for your team is to learn more about each framework and give them both a shot. It isn't always easy to break old habits; the road to a true Agile transformation can be long and daunting - we'd love to help you get on your way and show you how Jira can enable you to optimize your Agile processes; email us at contact@praecipio.com for more information. In the meantime, learn how Praecipio Consulting helps our clients conquer the Agile transformation using Atlassian tools, so they can drive business results, and innovate.

The Agile school of software development’s currently one of the most accepted methodologies for improving productivity. Targeted mainly towards IT managers and CIOs, Agile methods promote an interactive approach which have the ability to help flatten your organization’s cost of change curve.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development was first introduced in 2001, and outlines the foundation of Agile in twelve principles:

1. Customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of useful software
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development
3. Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
4. Working software is the principal measure of progress
5. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
6. Close, daily co-operation between business people and developers
7. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
8. Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
10. Simplicity- the art of maximizing the amount of work not done- is essential
11. Self-organizing teams
12. Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

Cost of Change Curve

First introduced by Barry Bohem in 1981, the cost of change curve represents the exponential increase in cost as it relates to making a change during the normal development phase of a product. This means that as your product moves farther down the developmental pipeline it becomes more costly to make changes and remedy errors.

That’s a good argument for Agile since it ensures you leave the current production phase with a product that’s as close to perfect as you can make it – particularly because Agile methodology calls for testing and up-front integration which translates to rapid production and minimal initial design. Since the test code’s written before functional code and automated test suites are built around the evolving code, developers are allowed to make rapid and aggressive changes.

The ability to make these changes is one of Agile’s key features and the result is a reduction in the amount of product errors late in the development phase, reducing the cost of change. Even if your organization enjoys a rather flat cost of change curve, Agile ideals can be applied to reduce the cost of change throughout the software life cycle.

Scrum

Scrum’s another widely accepted approach to implementing the Agile philosophy, which includes both managerial and development processes. This approach relies on a self-organizing, cross-functional team supported by a scrummaster and a product owner. Scrum makes your organization Agile by ensuring quick progress, continuously creating value, and by keeping projects on track. The most important concepts of Scrum are:

• Product backlog - A complete list of requirements that are not currently in the product release. Typical backlog items include bugs and usability/performance improvements.
• CI - Also known as continuous integration; allows for scrum teams to continuously integrate their work. This will often happen on a daily basis.
• User story – Describes problems that should be solved by the system being built.
• Scrummaster - The manager of the Scrum project.
• Burndown chart - The amount of work remaining within a sprint, i’s updated daily, and also tracks progress.
• Sprint backlog - A list of backlog items assigned to a sprint, but not yet completed

Kanban

Kanban means visual board – and that’s just what it is, a development process that revolves around a board to manage works in progress (WIP). A Kanban board includes “lanes,” each denoting different phases a project might take. It moves WIPs across the board and deploys them into production when they reach the done column. Since Kanban development practice revolves around WIP management each state of progress is limited to a set number of projects. Organizations able to leverage this high frequency of delivery typically enjoy a large financial benefit.  The most important concepts of Kanban are:

• Swim lanes - The horizontal lanes of a Kanban board represent the different states in which a WIP or task can exist.
• Backlog - A list of backlog items awaiting deployment, but not yet completed.
• Stories – A particular user need assigned to a development team.