Week 10: Agile Practice

Reflections

This week we continued our exploration of Agile practices. We’d briefly touched on Agile at the start of the module and have adopted some aspects of it throughout our time so far. Prior to this module, Agile was something that’d cropped up while exploring Project Management in my undergraduate degree. Beyond that, my knowledge was limited, and I’d not been explicitly involved in Agile practices.

This week’s readings have covered the various practices used throughout Agile, such as envisioning and estimating. I’ve found the differences between traditional linear project management styles and the iterative approaches offered by Agile to be quite stark in comparison. While traditional methods typically involve an upfront plan with little room for change, Agile methods readily accept change by design (Jadhav et al. 2017). I’ve never been distinctly aware of Agile practices being employed by the many organisations I’ve worked for. As such, I support Denning’s (2019) notion that many long-established organisations are neither Agile in a process-driven nor operational sense. This corroborates my experience of the retail and technology sectors over the past ten years while working in entry- to intermediate-level roles for large organisations.

Following a brief reflection on the events of the past 18+ months, the coronavirus pandemic has seen the standardisation of quick change, speedy decision-making and timely public guidance in an effort to keep everyone safe. Arguably, agility has meant the difference between life and death, a mentality that could similarly apply to businesses that refuse to change by adopting Agile practices. With that in mind, I digress to highlight my past belief that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Having formed an understanding of Agile methodologies and thus reflecting upon this mantra, I’ve begun questioning past decisions and considering different approaches that may have led to better outcomes. Agile hones in on the acceptance of failure (Digital.ai 2021), which is something I’ve struggled with my whole life. In my day-to-day life and future projects, I intend to adopt this mindset to learn from my failures and be kinder to myself.

As part of this week’s Spark Forum activity, I spoke about my experience of time management and what I do to ensure tasks are completed on time. This got me thinking about my existing method of recording deadlines in Google Calendar then making exhaustive to-do lists in Google Keep. Although I’m well accustomed to these, I’ve heard a lot about Kanban boards which fall under the Agile umbrella. So, I took it upon myself to download a project management software, Trello, with which I created a Kanban board of my very own. At first, I could see that I needed to invest some time in populating it with my work backlog; however, having done so, I can’t believe I hadn’t done it sooner. I’ve set it up so that I can easily see what I’m working on and what I need to accomplish, and by what date. I admit, this sounds very similar to my previous Google Calendar/Keep method; however, the visual nature of progressing task cards between virtual milestones sets this method apart. As a result, I feel empowered to complete tasks one at a time and less so to dabble in miscellaneous tasks before their eventual completion sometime in the future. Going forward, the Kanban board will allow me to ensure a steady rate of productivity by focusing on a set number of tasks at any one time. In theory, this should help avoid burnout and keep my mind at ease by having everything organised in a clearly defined manner.

It’s been truly eye-opening to study the finer details of Agile methodologies while also exploring the complexities of each. Below are my reflections on my readings into envisioning and estimation:

Envisioning

I was intrigued to learn of the envisioning element within Agile as I’d never considered this as a stage within project management. Planning through Epics seems a practical way of outlining the broader requirements of a project while briefly detailing stakeholder requests and sought after features. Furthermore, using User Stories makes sense to get an idea of your target market by defining their characteristics and preferences through a fictional persona.

Our challenge activity involved creating a user story for one of our rapid ideation (RI) artefacts. I chose my dyslexia support app from RI1 and enjoyed making my retrospective user story about “Johan” (see below image). Using the “as a <role>, I want <something>, so that <benefit>” format, I was able to inspect Johan’s life at a glance and build an understanding of the challenges he faced, as well as his goals for the future. Through unpacking and applying these elements to the product, it quickly became apparent how this method could be the source of multiple iterations and new features. Upon reflection, I can see the benefit of eliciting user requirements to gauge the scope of a product (Jadhav et al. 2017) and wish I’d known more about this when initially creating my artefact. I could have understood my target audience sooner and perhaps tailored my artefact closer to their actual needs with this information.

Estimation

The estimation portion of Agile considers a project’s product backlog and the likely time it will take to complete each item (Shekhar 2018). Typically this is done using units of time; however, I’ve focussed on the use of Story Points, a measure of the size, complexity, risk and effort required to conclude a backlog item. Story Points are a scoring measurement and, once defined, can be applied to a variety of scales. I’m particularly interested in the Fibonacci scale, where each number (or score) is the sum of the preceding two numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 etc.). Its use in estimation is significant since people estimate more poorly the larger the entity being scoped (Cline 2015). I find this phenomenon relatable in that the more complex a concept is, the more likely I am to suffer analysis paralysis, leading to a distorted view of the time required to complete a task. Currently, I spend too much time on small details when I know bigger issues need my attention. Going forward, I’d like to make use of the Fibonacci scale as it would help me better plan my workload.

Another element of Agile estimation is the velocity at which individuals or teams can measure their productivity. Velocity can be calculated based on Story Points from previous sprints or by agreeing on an amount of time to spend on a sprint, then comparing this to the actual time spent. Ultimately, velocity aids with forecasting the timeframe of a project, thus allowing for a more accurate representation of the costs associated with a project.

References

CLINE, Alan. 2015. Agile Development in the Real World. Berkeley, CA, UNITED STATES: Apress L. P. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/falmouth-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4218846.

CONSTANTINO, Eden. 2021. Photo by Eden Constantino on Unsplash. Available at: https://unsplash.com/photos/OXmym9cuaEY [accessed 15 Jan 2022].

COOKE, Jamie Lynn. 2012. Everything You Want to Know about Agile : How to Get Agile Results in a Less-Than-Agile Organization. Ely, UNITED KINGDOM: IT Governance Ltd. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/falmouth-ebooks/detail.action?docID=918799.

DALPIAZ, Fabiano and Sjaak BRINKKEMPER. 2021. ‘Agile Requirements Engineering: From User Stories to Software Architectures’. In 2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). 2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), September 2021, 504–5.

DENNING, Stephen. 2019. ‘The Ten Stages of the Agile Transformation Journey’. Strategy & Leadership 47(1), 3–10.

DIGITAL.AI. 2021. 15th Annual State Of Agile Report. Available at: https://digital.ai/resource-center/analyst-reports/state-of-agile-report [accessed 18 Dec 2021].

HILL, Linda A. 2020. ‘Being the Agile Boss’. MIT Sloan Management Review 62(1), 7–10.

JADHAV, Sapna K, Vikrant SHAGA and Surabhi D THORAT. 2017. ‘USER STORIES FOR PROPOSED WEB APPLICATION USING AGILE APPROACH’. International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science 8(9), [online]. Available at: https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/user-stories-proposed-web-application-using-agile/docview/1980479401/se-2?accountid=15894.

SHEKHAR, Shashi. 2018. Agile Software Development [Film]. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/agile-software-development/agile-estimation [accessed 18 Dec 2021].

STARTAÊ. 2018. Photo by Startaê on Unsplash. Available at: https://unsplash.com/photos/7tXA8xwe4W4 [accessed 15 Jan 2022].