Agile Core Practices Flashcards
Project charter
A document that tells the team why they are here and the project objective.
Team charter
A document that addresses how the team will work together around a team vision and clear working agreements.
Daily stand-up
Short team meeting where members typically stand up and the team walks through the current Kanban board tasks. Used for teams to micro-commit to each other, blockers are raised so the team can swarm around any issues, issues added to a parking lot to solve separately.
Backlog
a prioritized list
Product backlog
List of upcoming features for a product.
Sprint backlog
list of user stories for a sprint.
Who produces the product roadmap?
Product owner
Product roadmap
Includes a high-level sequence of features to be delivered. Product owner may also use high level prototypes showing how the product fits together.
Rolling wave planning
High level features broken down into user stories that go into the sprint backlog for a person to work on during a sprint.
Triads
Developer, tester, and business representative (product owner, senior user, or business analyst) “three amigos”
What does a triad do?
Works together to provide the requirements for user stories, document requirements into the cards, determine a solution and effort required, and size cards accordingly.
Story card sizing
Performed during backlog refinement, user story creation, or on its own. Team takes user stories that are “ready” and estimates the effort.
How do you size story cards?
T-shirt sizes (S, M, L, XL) and “relative sizing” using story points, based on the Fibonacci number sequence (1, 2 , 3, 5, 8, 21) user stories should be small enough to fit in a sprint or iteration.
What is backlog refinement?
When the product owner works with the team to ensure work is in the right order based on technical dependencies and customer value. Ensures cards are sized for effort to complete. Ensures the team has enough work to do during the next sprint and helps the team prepare user stories for the next 1 to 2 sprints or iterations.
What is sprint planning?
Involves selecting the current highest priority user stories and ensuring that they are sized, and checking the team’s current velocity or average throughput. Number of sized cards are then added to the next sprint (including any cards rolling over from the previous iteration) to match the current velocity.
What do teams do in Kanban?
Measure throughput (average number of user stories completed) and limit the work in progress (WIP)
Is sprint planning ongoing?
Yes, it is done through backlog preparation and refinement, story card collaboration, the product roadmap as well as sprint planning.
Retrospectives
A meeting, often facilitated by the team lead role at the end of a iteration, where the team comes together to discuss what went well, what challenged us and how we can improve, what did we learn, what still puzzles us and what questions to do we have? Can also be held when the team is stuck, when a team ships or complete something, or if more than a few weeks have passed since the last one.
Demonstrations/sprint review
Team completes usable features over time in the form of multiple user stories in each sprint. The aim is to complete something demonstrable in each iteration. The usable feature is then demonstrated to the customers (directly or through the product owner) who accept the item or give feedback on it. This ensures the team moves forward on the right track.
Continuous integration
Work is frequently incorporated into the whole product, then retested to ensure it still works as intended.
Test at all levels
Unit testing for each piece (user story), system testing the product end-to-end. User acceptance testing to test from a customer’s perspective and regression testing to check if anything existing has broken.
Acceptance test driven development
Team agrees on acceptance criteria for the work, writes the test first, ensures the test fails, then writes the code to pass the test.
Behavior driven development (BDD)
Writing the test as the behavior we want. BDD (Given, when, then) User stories (as a, I want, so I can)
Spikes
Timeboxed research or learning, often for technical solutions or acceptance criteria.
What do agile metrics focus on?
Delivering working products of demonstrable value to customers.
What are burndown charts used for?
To measure the iteration’s work.
What is cycle time?
Time to complete a piece of work like a user story.
What is lead time?
Time from the customer order to delivery like a feature.
What is velocity?
Average number of story points a team completes each sprint.
In agile is every project different or the same?
Different
What is a typical flow for a regular agile approach?
Product backlog, sprint planning, daily stand up, backlog refinement, sprint review, and retrospective, then you go back into sprint planning, etc. for the next sprint. Each sprint averages about 2 weeks. Small teams of 3-12. Visual mangement is used, information radiator, pairing to code and swarming around problems.
